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Operating Systems Linux

Fedora 16 Alpha Released 111

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the put-a-feather-in-my-red-hat dept.
AdamWill writes "Fedora 16 Alpha is released today, featuring GNOME 3.1.4 with a unified input indicator for keyboard layouts and input methods, KDE 4.7, GRUB 2 on new installations (with GPT disk labels) and several other major changes. You can download it now. Remember to read the important information in the release notes and common bugs page."
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Fedora 16 Alpha Released More

Fedora 16 Alpha Released

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  • Firefox 16 (Score:5, Funny)

    by ikkebra ( 867937 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @04:49PM (#37183898)
    I first read this as Firefox 16 Alpha Released and it still made sense.

    • Re:Firefox 16 (Score:5, Funny)

      by Baloroth ( 2370816 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @04:55PM (#37183954)
      Nah, thats not for a few weeks yet. I think.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Wait for it...
        Waaaiit for it...
        .
        .
        FIREFOX 16 IS RELEASED!
        NOW it is!
        No tabs anymore, no menus and no buttons. Full Gnome 3 integration. Everything you could ever dream of in your worst nightma
        FIREFOX 17 IS RELEASED!
        Wait... what? How can that be? Isn't FF16 jus
        FIREFOX 18 IS RELEASED!
        GAAH! Stop i
        FIREFOX 19 IS RELEASED!
        I...
        FIREFOX 20 IS
        FIREFOX 20
        FIRE
        FI
        F
        F
        F
        F
        F
        F
        F
        I
        I
        I
        I
        .
        .
        .

        SINGULARITY

        A movie by the Mozilla Foundation

  • Does it have a decent desktop? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mattventura ( 1408229 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @05:07PM (#37184090) Homepage
    I upgraded to Fedora 15 (from 13) and was so horrified by Gnome 3 that I immediately installed Debian so I could use Gnome 2. Even the "classic Gnome" option is still unusable.
    • Pick the one you like: https://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options#desktops [fedoraproject.org]
      And it's not like you're limited to these few either. No matter what distro, you can always set up a combination of window manager, dock/panel, apps etc. configured precisely the way you like.

      • Didn't see the G2TJFW option... (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        That's the Gnome 2 That Just Fucking Works option...

        F14 with Gnome 2 supported my 3 monitor setup beautifully. Gnome 3 just crashes, even in compatibility mode. I'm using Xfce, but it's still missing some of nice things that Gnome 2 had (eg cpu/io panel applets).

    • Well, I tried using Fedora 15 KDE Spin and is was no better. Close to utter crap. Slow to boot and buggy as hell. Dolphin would crash every now and then. After a recent update, boot time nearly doubled and nothing got better, so I decided to install Arch. To my surprise, now KDE was fast, responsive and mostly bug-free. My point: Fedora is too "cutting edge", meaning perpetual beta-quality. So maybe Gnome 3 (or an iminent 3.x) will turn out to be a lot better than what Fedora and other premature releasers a

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Burdell ( 228580 )

      I switched to XFCE (on Fedora 15). It is similar to the GNOME 2 "look and feel", especially if you spend just a little bit of time moving things around (although the default XFCE "look" isn't bad either).

    • Really? (Score:5, Informative)

      by neiras ( 723124 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @05:59PM (#37184666)

      I upgraded to Fedora 15 (from 13) and was so horrified by Gnome 3 that I immediately installed Debian so I could use Gnome 2. Even the "classic Gnome" option is still unusable.

      You do realize that GNOME 3 Classic Mode only has a few user facing differences from GNOME 2, right?

      1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.
      2. Panels now allow you to snap widgets to the center. New feature!
      3. There are fewer available panel applets, because the API changed. No more CORBA.
      4. The unified System Settings dialog replaces the System menu. I miss the old Preferences but can live with this.

      I have a GNOME 3 desktop that is practically identical to my old GNOME 2 desktop. Having changed the GTK theme from the black Adwaita theme, it even looks like GNOME 2.

      Fallback mode pretty much *is* GNOME 2. I really don't get what all the bitching is about. Surely a few missing panel applets and a unified settings dialog aren't reasons to discard a desktop environment.

      • Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mattventura ( 1408229 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @06:12PM (#37184802) Homepage

        1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.

        How the hell is that at all intuitive or good UI design? In other applications, even on windows, you right click the toolbar to customize it. And what was wrong with the "lock to panel" option for applets?

        • It's not a bad idea, but they should prompt the user at least once to tell them. Hiding things in help files isn't a good way of doing things, especially not when the user goes and tries to do something and encounters different behavior.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by fnj ( 64210 )

            Let's face it, it's a BAD idea. A STUPID idea. Keyboard mouse modifiers are BRAIN DEAD, awkward, and completely non necessary. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with the old way. Most important, everything was intuitive and discoverable. "By-mistake applet moves," MY LEFT BALL! Every applet was individually lockable in position in Gnome2. Anyone obsessed with fear that he might move them by "mistake" could lock them down, while the rest of us with at least a kindergarten level of motor coordination

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by renoX ( 11677 )

          >> 1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.

          > How the hell is that at all intuitive or good UI design?

          Oh, it must be a good UI design since Microsoft does the same in Windows with the "shift+right click" menu that 0.0001% of users know.
          So it's not even a *new* UI mistake, it's an old one!!
          Those who don't know history ... I guess.

      • Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)

        by fnj ( 64210 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @08:02PM (#37185802)

        The following is styled as if I am speaking to the Gnome developers, not the parent poster. If any of the following have been repaired since 3.0, I apologize, because 3.0 was so AWFUL it made me throw it on the floor within 5 minutes, and I haven't been inclined to waste any more time on the thing since then until I hear that all of the deficiencies noted below have been repaired.

        You do realize that GNOME 3 Classic Mode only has a few user facing differences from GNOME 2, right?

        The differences are actually significant and in the direction of LOSS of functionality. I guess you're not using the Drawer, Mini Commander, Weather, System Monitor, and CPU Freq Scaling applets, and I guess you don't have a simple compact digital clock with seconds and date in the upper right corner. Making it IMPOSSIBLE to set it up that way, and with control over the geometry, is NOT ACCEPTABLE because it is a GRATUITOUS loss of flexibility.

        1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.

        A stupid and pointless replacing of an intuitive and DISCOVERABLE operation by a HIDDEN and awkward one.

        2. Panels now allow you to snap widgets to the center. New feature!

        Allow? FORCE! That's not a feature, it's a bug. Give me CONTROL, dammit.

        3. There are fewer available panel applets, because the API changed. No more CORBA.

        I'm not an apologist. I'm a USER. I DEPENDED on those applets. Don't bore me with details of why your stupid infrastructure changes have led you to drop them. Just bring them back. ALL of them!

        4. The unified System Settings dialog replaces the System menu. I miss the old Preferences but can live with this.

        It's a pointless and needless complication, but yeah, it's not the most egregious of the mistakes.

        I have a GNOME 3 desktop that is practically identical to my old GNOME 2 desktop.

        That's nice for you, but I found that Gnome3 WOULDN'T LET me make a desktop that was even remotely like my old one.

        Fallback mode pretty much *is* GNOME 2.

        No, no, NO. It is NOT, and repeating that it IS, does not make it so.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by illtud ( 115152 )

        You do realize that GNOME 3 Classic Mode only has a few user facing differences from GNOME 2, right?

        1. You have to hold ALT when right clicking the panels in order to customize them. No more by-mistake applet moves.

        Yes, when I eventually found this I thougt that I had my old fc14 interface back, but I'm finding that this is serioulsy buggy. I don't know if it's a gnome problem or a FC15 problem, but the ability to do this comes and goes with the wind - when I saw this comment I tried it again, and the menu

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Errtu76 ( 776778 )

          My advice - stick to FC14 'til somebody at RH notices the stupidity of the gnome/FC15 upgrade and wait for the correction.

          You do realize that RH doesn't actually control what's going on in Fedora, right? Sure, a lot of Fedora developers work at RH but it's still a community distribution.

          That aside, Fedora has always been about staying close to upstream. If you know this, you would also know that this means you get new 'products' sooner than other distributions. Eventually Debian and the like will also ship

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by illtud ( 115152 )

            You do realize that RH doesn't actually control what's going on in Fedora, right? Sure, a lot of Fedora developers work at RH but it's still a community distribution.

            Yes, absolutely. Will RH whacking them with a cluestick have an effect? Yes, absolutely. Where do you think Fedora would be if it wasn't an RH incubator and with no RH devs working on it?

        • My advice - cut out the crap and run something sensible - like KDE. Fedora has reasonable KDE integration - shutdown a few services, and you're done.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ReinoutS ( 1919 )
      How about you try it for more than 5 minutes (say, 5 days), instead of 'immediately' switching away?

      • Use it for 5 days, get used to working around static elements in the UI you used to be able to change but now can't?

        People can adjust to anything, that doesn't resolve the fundamental problems or arrogant attitude conveyed by the GNOME 3 environment.

        • I did and came running to Windows 7. Let me tell you it was like a breath of fresh air and even that is better than Gnome 3 on a linux kernel. I can't get it to provide basic functionality. Can't even resize a Windows. ... ok later I found out a week later but even grandma knows what a minimize button is come on.

          Now that is a big shame since Linux is a technologically supperior OS. But my desktop is not a server.

          I have a 23 inch screen and not a phone to run Gnome 3.

          Also, Microsoft already has a tile UI in

      • I used Gnome 3 for 3 days, and that was 3 days too many.

        What were they thinking? Gaaaaaaack.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fnj ( 64210 )

          Took me 5 minutes to determine that it was such a regression functionally and in regard to flexibility, as to be garbage.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • To be fair, that's ultimately a Gnome problem, not a Fedora problem (although I concede that, yes, Fedora has included it in their release, but that's the way it's always been; it brings back fond memories for me of the KDE 4.0 inclusion)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fnj ( 64210 )

        Correctimundo. It is not anything "wrong" with Fedora. This is going to be rammed down everyone's throats in all distros for the simple reason that no one is going to be security patching Gnome2 any more.

      • Well Fedora is for desktops and workstations so yes it is a Fedora problem.

        I just wiped it off my laptop and put Windows 7 on it. It is a shame because I love Fedora and it is my favorite Linux distro. However, I want a basic desktop.

    • A few weeks ago, I installed FC15 (from FC 14). It didn't like my graphics card, so I didn't have as much chance to be horrified as some folks.

      I couldn't find a gui app to see what services were being started. In a forum on fedoraforum.org, it said that one was "in the works".

      Right. No problem. I went back to FC 14 the day I started this waste of time.

  • Another bad Fedora release. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Fedora has been going downhill.
    Last release, there were a lot of well known, annoying bugs. Especially with the gnome3 ui.
    This release is no exception.
    The first thing I noticed is fedora 16 alpha cd takes forever to boot now in virtualbox.
    I don't know if this is some kind of regression or feature creep, but it is painful in virtualbox.
    Another problem is that when gnome3 finally managed to pop up on screen, it had to use fallback mode. This is understandable since vbox doesn't have 3d acceleration. No biggie

    • Re:Another bad Fedora release. (Score:4, Informative)

      by supersloshy ( 1273442 ) on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @05:17PM (#37184186)

      It's an alpha release. Expect it to not be stable and still have some kinks that need to be worked out before release. Just report everything you find (if it's not reported already) and hopefully they'll get fixed.

      • It's an alpha release. Expect it to not be stable and still have some kinks that need to be worked out before release. Just report everything you find (if it's not reported already) and hopefully they'll get fixed.

        A nice way to describe Fedora as a whole.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I would agree. And that's NOT a bad thing. Fedora's whole point is to not be a stable, long-term distro so that it has a lot more latitude in which it can experiment. If you're looking for stability and running Fedora, you're the one who's wrong.

          • True, in a sense. But it should say so in the "box". A better worded version of "hey, shit tends to break every once in a while, but it's par for the course" somewhere in the website would be nice. Like Debian, that is pretty straightforward about its "unstable" and "testing" branches (both which tend to be more stable than Fedora, in my experience with them).

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by fnj ( 64210 )

              Duh; there is no box. But Fedora is up front about telling you that it is essentially the testing sandbox for Red Hat Enterprise linux. If you don't like bleeding edge, and you don't want to pay for RHEL [redhat.com], just use one of the clones; PUIAS [ias.edu], Scientific Linux [scientificlinux.org], or CentOS [centos.org]. They are absolutely free and absolutely stable, with a long supported life, and are supported with security updates and bug fixes.

        • While fedora does tend to be bleeding edge, there is a fair bit of difference between that and _alpha_.

          Very good for developer systems, been using it since before ubuntu even existed.

        • I switched to Fedora because it was more stable than Ubuntu.

          I know I will probably be modded down as a troll here but my wifi chipset will not work well with any verison of Ubuntu after 7.10. Java apps are buggy and ugly with a 2 year old bug that make them look like Java 1.0/Motif apps. I emailed connical twice and they said ... well its a bug in java not our problem etc. Many java haters I see here who say it is ugly run Ubuntu.

          With Fedora my wifi chipset works, java apps look native, and I never have a p

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Picass0 ( 147474 )

      All you've managed to do is tell me you don't like Gnome 3 and have problems with Virtualbox.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fnj ( 64210 )

        You are dying of thirst, crawling in the desert, and come upon the dead carcass of a camel, the only sign of life you have encountered in two days. Instead of realizing that you are after all probably going to die of thirst very soon because there is no rescue, you remark that your problems are due to the camel's design being lacking, and the fact that their owners let camels die.

        Face it. The desert is a hellhole, and you probably shouldn't have gone there to spend your summer vacation in the first place.

    • We don't support VirtualBox. Mainly because the Fedora kernel developers consider it a pile of...well...something awfully rude. If an issue with VirtualBox is isolated and traced back to something being wrong in Fedora, sure, it'll likely get fixed, but VBox is not something Fedora actively tracks and tests for.

      Fedora supports the qemu/kvm/libvirt/virt-manager virtualization stack, and we do test that quite extensively. But running as a virt client is required functionality for Beta, not Alpha.

      (FWIW, though

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fnj ( 64210 )

        We don't support VirtualBox.

        VirtualBox is essentially an x86 host. Fedora is supposed to run on pretty much any x86 host (special hardware features aside). Please consider "supporting" VirtualBox.

        • If it runs on real hardware it should run on your VM, if it doesn't the problem is with your VM, not fedora. simple

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fnj ( 64210 )

      Mod parent up. It's a perfectly arguable point.

  • Good thing they fixed that Input Indicator thing. Maybe they'll also fix it so that it's as easy as it was in GNOME 2 to actually install and activate the input methods. Or is using languages other than English too complicated for users and therefore we shouldn't be doing it?

  • I tried to use LyX 2 with Gnome 3 but couldn't save the path to my custom TeXLive installation in it's settings because the buttons to do so went amiss...
  • No thanks. Not going to try Fedora 16, ever. I am staying with Fedora 14 for the next few years. Maybe then I'll evaluate the state of desktop interfaces and see if anyone has come to their senses and stopped trying to foist some hipster-designed tablet interface on us. I have work to do with my computer, thank you very much, and that abomination known as Gnome Shell will not allow me to do it.
  • I was pretty frustrated with GNOME3 and just when i thought of giving up and going back to Fedora 14 i found this [1]. I now have a GNOME2 and it works like a charm. [1]http://k3rnel.net/2011/06/22/bluebubble-the-fine-manual/

  • !@#$%$^ GPT partitions... (Score:3)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @01:13AM (#37187742) Journal

    I can't !@##$%^& believe how Redhat and Fedora can't handle GPT right to save their !@#$@#% lives...

    RHEL5 should have included the GRUB patches to handle booting from GPT partitions... They did not. When it was released, 1TB SATA drives were available. RAID-5 with 4x1TB drives? Sorry, no, can't boot from it, unless your RAID controller is smart enough to divvy it up into pieces to make up for for the idiots at RH. I've gone through all kinds of !@##$% because RHEL5 is THE enterprise Linux operating system, and yet it doesn't !@##@$% support installing to, or booting from GPT partitions, which means you're limited to 2TB volumes, max.

    Okay, so they made a bad decision, but newer versions will solve all our problems, right? Wrong! Fedora goes back and forth with @$#$%%$^@ bugs around ANACONDA and GPT. Today, I can boot-up with a Fedora 15 disc, go through the menus, take a quick look at the layout, and find I've got 1/3rd unallocated on my 3TB hard drive, because it's using old msdos partitions, and there's no way for me to tell it to use GPT. @#$#$^$%! Put a GPT signature on it you say? Okay, now ANACONDA detects the disk is corrupted and asks if it should abort or wipe it out...

    Partition everything manually, you say? Well I would, but GNU parted is absolutely the most god-awful tool I've ever used...

    Okay here goes... mkpart 1GB 10GB
    WARNING: Not aligned, performance will be terrible... Ignore/Cancel?

    WTF? It converts my human units into billions of sectors, and can't be bothered to round it off to the nearest multiple of 8, or friggin' ask me if I want it to do so? Who the hell made this crap? Math is what computers are so damn good at, WTF do I need to pull out a pocket calculator to partition my !@#$#$% computer in the year 2011?

    Redhat drives me nuts. Imagine if the most popular luxury sports-car maker out there engineered their cars so that they couldn't be driven for more than 1hr straight, before shutting-down and needing to be restarted. That's the kind of fundamental stupidity we're talking about, here. Middle-of-the-road consumer hardware is over 2TB now, when are they going to fix this !@#$#%?

    I know, I know, I don't need to use parted. Someone else had half a brain and hated parted, too, and made gdisk just for this purpose: http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/ [rodsbooks.com] It doesn't take away from the sheer idiocy of either project...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by g1zmo ( 315166 )

      ...RHEL5 is THE enterprise Linux operating system...

      Then:

      Middle-of-the-road consumer hardware is over 2TB now...

      Yes, but even high-end enterprise hardware is not up against those limits yet.

      • even high-end enterprise hardware is not up against those limits yet.

        That's utterly idiotic. Enterprise SATA drives may lag behind consumer drives, but not by much, and enterprises will ALWAYS have raid arrays (multiplying the sizes), while consumers rarely do. Enterprise SAS drives are 750GBytes now, so it only takes a small array to break the 2TB mark there.

        IN AN ENTERPRISE, I had to deal with low-end servers that had over 2TB boot volumes, years ago, running on RHEL4.x (not a typo... RHEL4.x, as in BE

  • I don't think there was ever a need for GRUB2. Its complex and bloated. Seems like Linux is going more and more towards the proprietary Unix philosophy - doing simple things in difficult way.

    • "Grub (legacy) is no longer supported. Patches are not accepted. Grub2 is also nearing a stable release (14-May-2011 GRUB 1.99) which is something that Grub (legacy) never reached. "

      Upstream support, essentially. But yeah, our installer team isn't terribly happy with the design of GRUB 2 either. It's a choice between two evils.

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