Fedora 16 Released

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Release_Notes/index.html

by Garbage • 15 years ago

113 63 15 years ago

docs.fedoraproject.org

taudelta• 15 years ago

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

j_col• 15 years ago

The new Jules Verne inspired theme looks great.

rbanffy• 15 years ago

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

jtreminio2• 15 years ago

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!

herrwolfe2• 15 years ago

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

herrwolfe2• 15 years ago

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).

RexRollman2• 15 years ago

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.

cturner• 15 years ago

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

gnaritas2• 15 years ago

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

vault_• 15 years ago

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.

vilya• 15 years ago

What's your reasoning?

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

maratd2• 15 years ago

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.

technomancy• 15 years ago

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

brown9-2• 15 years ago

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.

nodata• 15 years ago

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?

RexRollman2• 15 years ago

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.

rplnt• 15 years ago

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

tchol• 15 years ago

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.

ajross• 15 years ago

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.

DanBC3• 15 years ago

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.

mapleoin• 15 years ago

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/

dignan2• 15 years ago

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

rwmj• 15 years ago

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.

melling• 15 years ago

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.

dignan2• 15 years ago

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.

pook1e• 15 years ago

> 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.

jqueryin• 15 years ago

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.

sciurus• 15 years ago

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).

DanBC3• 15 years ago

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.

RusAlexander2• 15 years ago

3d linux distro by popularity in the World.

Sindisil• 15 years ago

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]

2112313214• 15 years ago

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.

andrewl-hn• 15 years ago

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.

2112313214• 15 years ago

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.

dman2• 15 years ago

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.

2112313214• 15 years ago

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)

mdaniel• 15 years ago

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

codeine• 15 years ago

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

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

flink2• 15 years ago

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...

leif3• 15 years ago

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.

rjbond3rd2• 15 years ago

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).

leif3• 15 years ago

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.

murrayb• 15 years ago

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...

tdavis• 15 years ago

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!

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

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.

flink2• 15 years ago

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.

pekk• 15 years ago

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

RusAlexander2• 15 years ago

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

Fedora 16 Released

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