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pulseaudio isn't unique for Fedora. It's everywhere you know. It would be more correct to say: "Finally, even Fedora has it now".

It's great to see people show enthusiasm about their distro of choice, but don't hype what the rest of us has had for a long time

PulseAudio (and Avahi) developer is a Red Hat employee and Fedora 8 is the first distribution to have it enabled by default. It has been in the repository for a long long time. Read the news carefully before taking a jab at others.

1) I'm not taking a jab at anyone.
2) "Enabled by default" is irrelevant and has nothing to do with this. The only thing that matters is whether or not it is available. Besides that, not all distributions have a default configuration
3) I read the news carefully, and it is news. But dissing other distributions despite them having the same packages installed (by default or as dependencies for other packages) for longer than Fedora simply isn't acceptable.
4) I have nothing against Fedora users, but I do have something against people dissing other people. So, don't do that.

I've been a Fedora user for long long time too (and Redhat Linux 6 thru 9 before FC2). It's also a long long time since I jumped to another (and more bleeding edge as well as stable) distribution.

All I wrote was that people shouldn't hype what the rest of us already have. Nothing wrong about that wish.

Defaults do matter for the large majority of users and makes a big difference in the user experience and is infact what makes distribution's different to a large extend. Also PulseAudio maintainer is a Fedora developer and has done months of work in getting it to a state here it works robust enough for many use cases. As an example, a plugin for Flash for written during the Fedora 8 development time in response to request from users testing and participating in the discussions while makes Flash and PulseAudio work well together. I doubt that any other distribution has it yet. So yes, defaults matter and what is in the repository and how it is configured matters too.

So from now on we'll judge a distro based on what it has enabled by default ? Yeah, I'm going too far, still, I'm not willing to do that. Availability counts more than enable-ity. Giving the credit for pulseaudio development is one thing, saying a distro is better because it has it by default, is another. For the average users, it won't matter if it's there or not, since they don't know what it is anyway. For us here, the news is that it's in a better state of development, and that it's available, the rest well, chitchat.

Yep. Teh first packages I saw of Pulse was in Ubuntu. Up until recently what was missing was the flash support and xine support. Luckily this has been resolved and is pretty easy to find and configure the correct packages. i'm hoping that pulse becomes the defacto sound server since it has many promising features coming down the line.

The biggest problem seems to get some proprietary apps to work on Pulse. In some cases it's possible to use OSS/alsa wrappers, but few important apps (Realplayer, some Skype versions..) still refuse to work (pasuspender is a last resort for those).

So it's good that RH is pushing this as default. It will force them to either support PA or make their applications work with the emulation.

I have been using it happily since 7.04 Ubuntu (0.9.6). ESD emulation refuses to work, but otherwise I enjoy added functionallity (still with minor annoyances like latency while changing volume, etc.).

what people have probably missed in the last few releases is the huge amount of work on the 'infrastructure' behind fedora in order to get it to where it is today,

it's clear now that that work is now showing the fruits of fruition and everything is coming together

* custom spins
* fedora 8 on a usb key
* pulseaudio
* codecbuddy
* yum improvements (yes it's fast)
* packagemanagement improvements (change repos and more)
* gui for firewall
* online desktop
* the whole fedoraproject.org website and associated projects

i think F9 (yes I'm talking about that already) will be awesome, as it'll most likely have compiz enabled by default plus a whole lot more, and no doubt it'll have ironed out any bugs still present or yet to be found in F8

cheers
anyweb

How can Red Hat and the Fedora community do all this great job without an alliance with Microsoft ?

It's more about getting OpenOffice and other linux tech to work better with Microsoft's products. Microsoft can't possibility just make them working together without some gain or license.

The same way other great distros do it: Hard work and dedication to the goals of the project. Ubuntu is as far along in some respects, and further in a few more, than Fedora and without any help from Redmond. Slackware, while behind on features, is hands down the most rock-solid, stable major distro out there, again without Microsoft's help. FreeBSD, while not a Linux distro, is open source UNIX and is the most popular internet server OS, without a shred of Microsoft input.

Why on earth would any Linux distro or other alternative OS really need help from them to do good things?

Dude honestly, what rock did you crawl out from under? If you want "rock solid Linux" use RHEL. It has a multitude more qa and users finding and ironing out bugs. Also Pat makes Slackware a (mostly) 1 man job. You've never ran mission critical servers with uptime requirements allowing less than 20 hours of scheduled downtime / year have you? It shows.

FreeBSD might be the most popular server os if you work at Yahoo, but the rest of the internet disagrees with you. If you want to refute what I'm saying show me a reputable source with some numbers to back it up. You won't find them.

Edited 2007-11-09 00:40

FYI: "codecbuddy" is a new API from the gstreamer project. As a matter of fact, the idea came from some random Ubuntu developer and was punted around with the gstreamer upstream. They wrote the code and Ubuntu was the first distro to have this functionality.

Now upstream gnome software like totem is taking advantage of that API if it exists to do this on any distro. Very cool stuff indeed.

Not quite true. Ubuntu used a separate shared library called libgimme and Bastien Nocera, Red Hat developer who is also the Totem maintainer pushed the code upstream and it was made part of the upstream project itself instead of a separate shared library. Then he used that API and worked with other developers to enable codeina aka codec buddy. Refer http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/CodecBuddy for more information on this.

Edited 2007-11-08 21:07

That's what SEJeff wrote.. *sigh*

Read what people writes, before you take a jab at them.

I'm confused what exactly you disagree with me on since you agree with exactly what I said.

The idea came from a discussion on the Ubuntu development mailinglist of which I subscribe. They punted around ideas with gstreamer upstream and gstreamer upstream wrote in the hooks. libgimme won't work without the hooks in gstreamer fyi.

This was a huge deal during the feisty (Ubuntu 7.04) development period because the Canonical developers weren't sure if the gstreamer developers would have the API complete in time for them to sync the changes and ship it with Ubuntu before the freeze / release of Feisty. libgimme-codec was a stopgap until the API was feature complete.

Then this was pushed upstream and now other distros can use it. Kind of like how Ubuntu uses Fedora's system-config-printer and they sent enough bugfixing patches that they have commit access to it's vcs repository.

So what was "not quite true" about this?

I've skipped the last few Fedora releases, I think openSUSE does a better job, but I do plan on trying Fedora 9. I think F9 really has the potential to blow up! What I mean is Fedora could really get huge, depending on how the implement KDE4. That's why I think F9 could really get big, is if KDE4 is really slick and smooth in Fedora, combine that with just having Fedora now, no Core and Extras, I think it really might prove to be a sweet release.

well, you can always use vmware/qemu/virutalbox...

heh, i'm curious, what are you hopping from ?

"heh, i'm curious, what are you hopping from ?"

I was considering hopping from Ubuntu. Though Mandriva 2008 looks good too...mmm so many polished choices...

I'm thinking the same thing. Ubuntu has been nice but who cares about loyalty when you have timeshifting wallpaper .

Wow. We agree. ;-)

About the cutting edge part, anyway. That's what makes Fedora fun. And it does not stop with the included packages, either. The cutting edge regression testing and quality control means that it's actually pretty stable, considering the amount of churn in the packages. It is not only up to date when you install it. It tends to stay that way. If an upstream developer releases a 1.02 release to supercede 1.01, Fedora passes that on to the user. WRT the kernel, have a look at the updates repos for previous releases. You will find that as new kernels are released, and after a period of testing, they update the kernel. For example, FC6 started with kernel 2.6.18. But currently has 2.6.22.

So, you see, cyclops, your wish to have the latest kernel is already granted. :-)

And, IMO, it really makes more sense to plan around the release of the default DE. The DE is really more significant to most end users, and requires more attention by the distro maintainer, than does the kernel. Assuming desktop use, anyway.

I know we don't always see eye to eye. But since we are both impressed with Fedora, I do hope you find this helpful and interesting.

-Steve

Edited 2007-11-08 19:17

Heh... looks like you really did him the "smackdown." Don't worry, though... Sbergman isn't a Vista User like I am.

"""
Don't worry, though... Sbergman isn't a Vista User like I am.
"""

I avoid it like the plague. ;-)

But I thought "creepy individual" was a bit half-hearted and unimaginative. A far cry from the old days when he used to call me a "slimy little toady".[1]
Ah, memories! :-)

Anyway, I have about 5 internal and customer servers I'll be ungrading to F8. My own desktop first, of course. This does look like a nice release.

[1]http://www4.osnews.com/permalink?272915

Edited 2007-11-11 02:26

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DistributionUpgrades

Important :
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/sn-Installer.h...

I did an upgrade from a vanilla 7 for 7.92 and then applied the patched to that to get to what to all intents and purposes is Fedora 8.
There were a few glitches with the 7.92 but according to Bugzilla, these have been fixed if the released package set for Fedora 8 and so far, I have to say that it was overall and pleasurable experience when compared to other FC series upgrades (3,4 & 5)

I have to agree with a previous poster. There has been lots of work under the covers that has improved the overall distro in leaps & bounds. This is especially true with 7 and now 8.

So far, so good.

Make sure you have a LOT of free space:

$ yum upgrade
[snip]
Error Summary
-------------
Disk Requirements:
At least 24122MB needed on the / filesystem.

WOW! I know, I only have ~150Mb free on / (after downloading all updated packages) but still...

You also need a lot of RAM, apparently:

Cleanup : pcsc-lite-devel ################### [1337/2012]
error: Couldn't fork %preun: Cannot allocate memory
Cleanup : gnome-mag ################### [1338/2012]
error: Couldn't fork %preun: Cannot allocate memory
Cleanup : perl-IO-Socket-INET6 ################### [1339/2012]
error: Couldn't fork %postun: Cannot allocate memory
Segmentation fault


Nice. Anyone know how to "recover" from this?

Better place to ask about that...
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list

Edited 2007-11-09 11:02

Just curious, have you tried these methods below before upgrading?
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq?highlight=(yum)#head-95a2ac1207272256325354f5ebb0b9cc05511d7a

Yes and in the end I decided to just re-install from CD.
Now I know who "yum upgrade" isn't recommended.

Something there is pretty sloppy. They go OOM and then segfault? Great testing there!

If you OOM, all sort of weird things happen. That isn't specific to the upgrade process. moreover the yum upgrade is still not supported officially. Refer

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq

Well that's true only for nerds. The kind of people who also wanted the latest and the greatest for Windows ;-). The downside with getting the latest and the greatest with Windows is that you had to pay or pirate :-p

Fedora has actually been in development longer than Ubuntu.

Not quite. Ubuntu began its life with as a fully formed distro that forked off of Debian, so while Ubuntu was in development as Ubuntu for less than Fedora was, it started with all the advantages Debian had.

And Fedora didn't start off with RedHats advantages?
I'd rather not go down this distro war path. Fedora put out an outstanding release and i can't wait to try it, im just ticked nobody can install satellite till next week! they were supose to be her tomorrow tha punks.

Give the Live CD a spin it should give you a good idea how well supported your hardware it. In general, the intel wireless cards are pretty well supported.

The Live CD isn't installable, perchance?

yes, you can install it to hdd

Yeah, you can install from the Live CD.

i think your intel wireless will work just fine,

read this:-

"Fedora 8 also brings a new graphical firewall configuration tool called system-config-firewall, this tool allows users to quickly and easily configure their firewall. Werewolf also claims to have better laptop support, which is always popular, and I for one can only agree, my wireless nic (0c:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN Network Connection (rev 61)) worked out of the box, all I had to do was configure WEP.
"

taken from > http://linux-noob.com/review/fedora/development/#f8

cheers
anyweb

I have the infamous Broadcom 4318 card which finally has decent built-in support in Ubuntu 7.10. It still requires that you either already have the firmware as a local file or else that you have a working wired connection before it will fully enable. I'm sure this is purely because of license issues as there is no open-source firmware for this chipset. Still, it's better than the tedious command-line dance of 7.04 and earlier.

I'm downloading FC8 right now and I look forward to finding out if it is just as easy as Ubuntu to get wireless up on my card. I have a feeling it will go as smoothly if not more so.

"""

"""

Me too. In my laptop. But the support for it in Ubuntu has been good for the last 2 or 3 releases. It is supported by the restricted drivers manager now. But in Edgy and Feisty, installing the firmware was just a matter of telling synaptics to install it and saying "yes" when it asked if you want to install the firmware. Yes, you do need a working wired connection first. But it's a hell of a lot better than all the hunting around for a working link to the firmware that I used to have to do.

"""

"""

Been there. Done that. It's not. I spent an hour trying to get mine going and it didn't work. I decided to put Ubuntu back on it. But I'm waiting for my bittorrent download of F8 to complete so I can upgrade my desktop box from F7.

That's odd because the fwcutter package in the repositories in 7.04 and previous didn't work for my card. I resorted to command-line stuff I found on a few forum posts. They all involved manually downloading the .debs from other locations as well as pulling my own firmware from my laptop's recovery CDs. As of 7.10 though, the restricted drivers manager has a built-in link to a firmware that works, though I've found that using my own firmware instead gets me better signal strength for some odd reason. Either way, it's a few clicks in a GUI compared to a lot of copy-and-paste to a terminal.

For what it's worth, my laptop is a Compaq Presario V2565US.

>I'm downloading FC8 right now and I look forward to finding out if it is just as easy as
>Ubuntu to get wireless up on my card. I have a feeling it will go as smoothly if not more
>so.

If it depends on proprietary code, it's "no go" on Fedora.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems#NDISwrapper
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.advisory-board/32...

Edited 2007-11-09 07:46

The bcm43xx driver is already in vanilla kernel.

Works semi good. There are some problems with the signal strength (10 meters from my router the signal strength drops to 47%, i get 10% at ~25 meters). But at least it works.

You still need to get the proprietary firmware.
Don't know about fedora, but ubuntu installs the firmware using the 'restricted drivers' tool.

Edited 2007-11-09 08:42

That is just the text based installer if you are booting from the live cd into runlevel 3. If you are booting into a desktop environment, just click the "install to hard disk" icon on the desktop. It doesn't get any easier than that ;-)

Here is a screenshot

http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p...

That's the Fedora KDE Live image but GNOME Live image works the same way too.

Considering that Fedora has synaptic too, I wouldn't say it a difference at all ;-)

# yum install synaptic (which uses apt-rpm)

and off you go. Yum which is the default package manager and Add/Remove programs (pirut) which is the default graphical frontend does work well. Users who want more advanced options might take a look at yumex which is a alternative graphical frontend.

Others prefer Smart package manager which is also available in the repository. Finally the next version of Fedora will have PackageKit which is a distribution neutral graphical frontend. Refer

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/FeatureList

package management in Fedora is very easy too,

you can use the gui tool (Pirut) or do it via a terminal if you prefer aka:- yum install xchat

easy and quick.

cheers
anyweb

Thanks Rahul and Anyweb!

So when you use Pirut/Synaptic/Yumex or in the future PackageKit you automatically are connected to a Fedora repository?

Yes that's the coolest thing. They all connect to the same Fedora repository and use the exact same RPM database. You can even switch between them whenever you want. This is possible because yum, recent versions of apt-rpm and smart all understand the repomd format originally designed for yum and they are rely on RPM libs to do the backend transactions.

Similiar for PackageKit which can work as a graphical frontend on top of yum, apt,smart etc.

That sounds great!
I think it's time to try it out again!
(The last time I used Fedora/Red Hat was version 6.2)