Submitted by “The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of the fourth and final test release of Fedora 7! Test 4 is for beta users.” Announcement and release notes
here. Update: Screenshots.
Fedora 7-test 4 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Maybe its just me but i dont find it (fedora) to be a distro worth the time.
You guys go ahead and try it.
Contrary here. If you want to check the latest and greatest (not necessarily stable) in OSS then Fedora is a great choice. Fedora’s purpose is mainly to develop and test drive newest technologies which range from desktop usablity tools for newbies to server tools/services e.g. Directory Server, GFS, new Wifi stack etc. I still find it stable enough to install and configure (mp3, flash, dvd etc) it for all of my friends desktops as a Windwos replacement.
Most of us IMO just want a working OS. I couldn’t care less about edgy Linux distro that just isn’t stable enough for desktop or server. I don’t want to be a beta (or alpha) tester for Red Hat :/
Then use CentOS, Ubuntu, Suse or any other stable/user-centric distro. This is OSS we’re talking about here, so nobody forces you to use Fedora – it just provides the possibility to get in touch with bleeding edge technologies and also learn a lot about development process and future of FLOSS if you follow the mailing lists that are publicly accessible.
I was referring to Fedora loosing appeal. Red Hat Linux and first Fedoras were quite stable, at least in my experience. Not so much with the latter ones.
I’ve found each to be rather stable…
Also – especially – Fedora 7 is making many usability enhancements to appease many common complaints.
Fedora really drives most interesting technology, and the developers are competent, so generally (at least by release) the systems are very solid.
Pah-leeze… I have been using Fedora 6 to do all my work on and it works great. I am using Fedora Test 7 to write this on. No problems so far. It looks great and it is working nicely. I also have MySQL, PHP and Apache web server running in the background for testing. All the servers are running smoothly.
Then use windows. Any user of Linux is a tester for Red Hat as their product is derived from community contributions of all. Welcome to OSS, enjoy your stay.
And if you want the latest and greatest and STABLE in OSS, then use Arch Linux. AND you don’t have to struggle in the slightest with mp3, flash, dvd, etc.
I must say the new Fedora look has gone downhill from FC6. I loved the helix logo, but the new balloon/cloud style feels pretty blah.
Arch linux is amateuristic crapware
Yeah, the best reason to not use a distro is its default wallpaper.
The Helix thing was a bit on the dark side, though.
The balloon thing is bright, people will like it.
If you try and change your wallpaper though, you’ll find some of the same old stuff that has been in there since FC5 or older, as far as I know. The green meadow, the stone bird, you name it (I know, it’s a bit unexciting).
I like the balloon wallpaper.In addition Fedora managed to set a decent icon theme.
Yub, it’s just you.
I would have agreed with you in the past, but I think with this release Fedora will make a comeback. It will be a good competitor for Ubuntu.
I don’t think it can give Ubuntu a run for its money as it is not DEB based, and imo, the best RPM distro at the minute is Suse.
If Fedora 7 is as good as Suse, it will succeed, as Fedora is not crippled with YAST.
I use Fedora 5 at work and Fedora 6 at home. I have no complaints at all. I pound the work computer pretty hard with calculation, and my family uses the computer at home more than I do. They even use the gimp with our digital camera
They even use the gimp with our digital camera
That statement looks very patronising…. unless you have had experiences like that yourself….
My mum bought a Dell about three years ago. It came with XP. She then bought a Panasonic camera. After all her trips out, it was “David, copy the pictures off that camera for me”, “David, can I get them on a CD”, “Can you email these pictures to your Uncle Sammy” and so on and so forth….
I installed Xubuntu on her machine, showed her f-spot, k3b and evolution. She loves Linux now and evangelises to everyone she knows who has a computer.
Fedora has been completely stable for me. I dont know what you people are talking about.
I would not call it bleeding edge, either. It usually has a six month release cycle like Ubuntu and other distros.
Bleeding edge distros are those who offer version updates for all the supported packages prior to the next OS release.
Fedora also happens to be one of the most security conscience distro of them all. Thats something to apprecitate, especially in the event Linux begins gaining real adoption.
Actually I found that compared to redhat 9 the fedora releases 1,3… [1] etc that stability went from bad to worse etc and everything got very buggy.
Fedora 6 (and bit 5) has put a tremendous reverse in that trend (at least for me) and making it one of the best/stable distro’s I know. I do use smart for package management because the default one.
I’m going to see if 7 does manage to improve onto 6
[1], fedora 2 was actually (for me) damn stable & good
Remember, “The Fedora Project is a collection of projects sponsored by Red Hat, and developed as a partnership between the open source community and Red Hat engineers.”
This is where Red Hat goes crazy and test new stuff they want to implement in the future. You will find that releases like 3 and 6 are stable because these are the ones where RHEL is built upon. Other releases are more experimental and unstable.
If you are a sysadmin and you use Fedora for your work stations or servers, you are crazy. While some releases like FC3 are very stable, their life cycle is very short and updates and patches will soon stop coming. Use fedora at home, to play with. But if your are looking at long term, go for CentOS or Ubuntu.
Again, thanks to the Fedora folks for their hard work, while I use CentOS at work, most of the success of this distro is thanks to them (and Red Hat of course … dah!!!)
SELinux, native firewall configuration UI, real kernel updates, good availability of packages.
Put simply, since FC5 I never had any stability problems. My only problem with Fedora is definitely boot time. It’s snail slow at best. I hope they improve boot times.
Package management is also no more of a issue to me – YUM is now fast and reliable on the command line, though the graphical management for it still sucks because it doesn’t give proper feedback when managing big transactions – another area for improvement, though not crucial IMO.
I’m currently testing Ubuntu 7.04 and I can only say that the only thing better than Fedora is boot time – it’s at minimal decent speed. Other than that, Ubuntu is not for me. I really want to put emphasis on boot time, since I and others can’t get suspend working properly on my laptop and I hate to leave it on (think about wasted energy and global warming).
By the way, to those who call Fedora the RH guinea pig, let me just say that I don’t understand why think like this when RH is actually good for the OSS community (lots of contributions) and is actually a decent company that is a reference in how to make proper business out of Open Source. You even have CentOS and other examples that show we’re not exactly dealing with evil here.
As for Ubuntu, though it’s not my prefered distro, I can’t say more than congratulate the project for advancing Linux into user friendliness and novice accessibility!
Now, I can’t wait for Fedora 7 to come out and put my hands on it – I can say with confidence that after messing with other mainstream distros (Suse, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Zenwalk, Vector) Fedora is and will be my distro of choice.
Good luck and good work for all the Fedora developers!
My thoughts exactly, really.
I really want to put emphasis on boot time, since I and others can’t get suspend working properly on my laptop and I hate to leave it on (think about wasted energy and global warming).
Can I strongly suggest reading this post from Dave Jones (RH/FC kernel Maintainer, well one of two).
He’s talking specifically about suspend problems, and requesting feedback/input.
http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/77250.html
“By the way, to those who call Fedora the RH guinea pig, let me just say that I don’t understand why think like this when RH is actually good for the OSS community (lots of contributions) and is actually a decent company that is a reference in how to make proper business out of Open Source.”
Now i only ask because i don’t know not to start anything. But what did RH bring to the table for oss as a whole and not just linux?
Here: http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2006/01/red_hat_t…
It basically shows how to make an IT company survive from Open Source in a capitalist world. What do you get from it as a non customer or non affiliate to Red Hat? You get their contributions to the Linux Kernel and other OSS projects.
Now it’s easy to flame Red Hat by saying it’s all about interests, but IMMO (In My Moderate Opinion) who doesn’t has interests? People always have interests. Wanting a free world is an interest for example.
Where Red Hat really shines is in how to make business out of sharing their work. And ultimately everybody wins because you benefit from it, either directly (from Fedora) or indirectly (i.e. from the Linux Kernel).
This is one motivating agent for me to keep using Fedora.
Now, if you care about corporate ethics and their relation with companies related to OSS (Novell, Mandriva, Linspire, even Ubuntu) I invite you to take investigate about how they work, what they give and what they take back. I won’t even talk about Microsuffer here – the most obvious opposite of Red Hat.
Thanks
“It basically shows how to make an IT company survive from Open Source in a capitalist world. What do you get from it as a non customer or non affiliate to Red Hat? You get their contributions to the Linux Kernel and other OSS projects.”
What do they give to other projects..? Please do give me some exsamples.
“Now it’s easy to flame Red Hat by saying it’s all about interests, but IMMO (In My Moderate Opinion) who doesn’t has interests? People always have interests. Wanting a free world is an interest for example. ”
It’s very easy to flame a company if you don’t like it. You show it in your own post
But i did’nt flame RH intentionel and i did mention that i wasnt out to start anything but i asked because i did’nt know.
“Where Red Hat really shines is in how to make business out of sharing their work. And ultimately everybody wins because you benefit from it, either directly (from Fedora) or indirectly (i.e. from the Linux Kernel). ”
I do respect the fact that they give back their work but i don’t use linux but i might benefit from it anyways who knows. I’m sure they support some of the open source software i use.
“This is one motivating agent for me to keep using Fedora.”
Fedora is one of the distros i used in the past i cant say it was a pleasure. Very memory hungry. I’m sure it has improved but i cant really say i’m in a hurry to try it out again.
“Now, if you care about corporate ethics and their relation with companies related to OSS (Novell, Mandriva, Linspire, even Ubuntu) I invite you to take investigate about how they work, what they give and what they take back. I won’t even talk about Microsuffer here – the most obvious opposite of Red Hat. ”
You could add iXsystems to the list over companies that have a fine relationship with OSS.
A few examples:
– SCIM Input Framework
– Kernel 2.6 Virtual Memory manager
– NetworkManager
– cairo
– AIGLX
Complete list:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions
that was what i wanted all along. Thanks dude. Cant help being lazy
As i expected they are involved in some of the software i have on most of my boxes.
I did actually two installs of Fedora Core 6 one on my work laptop and the other on my workstation at work. Both took me a little while to configure all of the settings and get everything the way I like it.
Next install was my Mom’s computer I built, she was running FC5 and I wiped it and installed FC6 she is 64 years old and is impressed with the new upgrade. As well as I am impressed this is a good distro and it gets better and better with each release.
The only complaint I had is Firefox 1.5 was installed and I had to install FF2.0.3 and it was one CLI and it was done! Other than that of course I add the extras and gedit the repo config customizing my installs.
As a matter of fact I am working on my hosting server right now getting everything needed for the perfect FC6 install. Since I work I support thousands of compute nodes and storage nodes running RHEL3/RHEL4 so it makes logical sense to stick to this EXCELLENT Distro!
Heh. Use debian/ubuntu for servers, it’s more reliable
.
/me ducks for cover.
I was thinking in testing Fedora, but I must know some thing first: Am I able to update my system from one version to another… say…. will Fedora 7 guys be able to update their system from 7 to Fedora 8 without having to reinstall the whole beast ?
Yep, that’s possible, though the best with any distro is to backup the .folders in your home partition and make a fresh install. This way, you’ll get most of your settings preserved, have little to tinker with configuration and above all else, you get a clean system.
Well, not exactly the “best with any distro”
Rolling release based distros like Archlinux are made to be used that way.
And I simply love it
That also limits the possibility of making major changes, which is something Fedora is NOT about…
To each their own.
I see your point though, his statement was rather ignorant.
It is possible although it is not recommended. However, upgrading from distro n to distro n+1 can be bad especially when third parties packages are installed and there is a major changes those brake the installed application (example, Nvidia driver incompatibility with newest Xorg-X11 and new SELinux policies). A good advice is to back up your data and reinstall the system from scratch.
Hmmm, NO.
Mine failed going from FC5 to FC6. It was running the upgrade for around 3 hours, then would not reboot.
I had to wipe/reinstall.
They need something like “update-manager”
Which, on my other machine went like this…
6.06
“sudo update-manager -c -d”
reboot into new 6.10
“sudo update-manager -c -d”
reboot into newer 7.04
there you go, updated through 2 newer versions and it is still running sweet.
thats the difference between DEB and RPM.
They need something like “update-manager”
I updated from Fedora 6 to the test using the shell command ‘yum update’ and it worked okay. In general this is not recommended since it can cause problems. I backed up my home directory and .hidden files just in case.
Edited 2007-04-27 00:11
I updated from Fedora 6 to the test using the shell command ‘yum update’ and it worked okay. In general this is not recommended since it can cause problems. I backed up my home directory and .hidden files just in case.
You really should be using yum upgrade, this takes in to account –obsoletes (I.E. removing packages that are no longer needed).
upgrade
Is the same as the update command with the –obsoletes flag set. See update for more details.
No, that’s the difference between yum and apt, if anything.
Fedora also doesn’t utilize depends as Ubuntu does, Ubuntu upgrades go smoothly because of ‘ubuntu-desktop’…
‘aptitude show ubuntu-desktop’
This is also the primary reason Ubuntu is bad, to have smooth updates, you need to have everything installed that they think you need… which is fine for novices…
Edited 2007-04-27 01:07
Yeah there should be a way of removing things from metapackages. I’m guessing thats an issue with dpkg though. I usually never do a rolling upgrade, because I usually hose my system far before that. I’m a tinkerer and I like to test things so for the most part by the time a new version comes out, if I don’t’ have the beta installed already, my system is usually slow from all the crap in it. Luckily I have three harddrives to test crap on. I’ve been thinking about taking up fedora again to at least see where they are going. I was going to do the same with Suse.
Although it’s not a big issue for me, I was just wondering – does anyone know why /dev/hdx has now been changed (in the Linux kernel) to /dev/sdx? I realize it’s not a Fedora issue as such, but the kernel (I believe since 2.6.20) has gone to this syntax, and I was just curious as to what motivated this change.
Edited 2007-04-26 23:33
Dude read the release notes:
“mportant Warnings about the Test Release
* The 2.6.21 kernel uses new IDE drivers which use the same
‘libata’ subsystem as the SATA drivers. As a side-effect, IDE
devices previously named /dev/hdX will now be named /dev/sdX.
This may cause problems with anything that mentions devices by
name instead of by filesystem label. Anaconda should be able to
detect most of these problems and help you fix them. “
That’s because Linux 2.6.20 introduced a new IDE infrastructure based on SATA – SATA and SCSI disk are refered as sdx and now so are PATA drives as well.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=803&slide=4
Has someone managed to install the nvidia driver?
I suspect SELinux prevented somehow the instalation in test3 because when i disabled SELinux the driver was correctly loaded.
During installation, if you set the SELinux setting to permissive, you’ll find that the Nvidia driver will work correctly.
During installation, if you set the SELinux setting to permissive, you’ll find that the Nvidia driver will work correctly.
I know but i would like to have the nvidia driver up and running with enforcing targeted policy which was plain and simple with FC6.
I understand your concerns though, hence my comments on the subject about SELinux on the Ubuntu article.
How valid is SELinux to the average desktop user; it might give some ‘power users’ that warm fuzzy feeling, but ultimately the end user isn’t going to use those advance fine grained security settings.
Hence, for me, I question the validity of actually including them in a distribution unless they’re properly setup so that these sorts of issues don’t arise. If they’re included and no problems occur, then its an icing on the cake for the end user, if it causes problems as shown by the problems between Nvidia and SELinux security settings, then simply end users will become frustrated that will not damage the distribution that uses it, but Linux in general because of one bad experience.
any chances of a release Candidate before final? or even a test5?
i dont think they have any plans for it, but if they think it’s needed, there will be.
Maybe they should go with one or do what Ubuntu is doing, release or start on Fedora 8 quicker
So far Fedora 7 test4 works great for me. Firefox 2, Thunderbird 2, flash plugin rpm from Adobe.com installed flawlessly.
I just could not find mp3 plugins in pirut (Add/Remove Software). Enabling fedora-extras doesn’t help, because pirut would fail at the start, saying no mirror found. Perhaps that’s because of the merger of fedora-core and fedora-extras.
That might be because Fedora Extras doesn’t exist anymore?
There’s now only Fedora.
Using a non-devel (i.e., FC6) Extras will mess things up.
BTW, I noticed in test 3 that you don’t even need the flash 9 plugin rpm; you can click on the “download plugin” thingy in FF2 and it’ll be set (to my surprise, actually).
I recommend always using the tar.gz, though.
Never trust packagers you don’t know.
On a ‘side’ note, I think this looks like it will be a great Fedora release.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats says I need to go to Fluendo.com and download the plugin. I did that (no cost, though there is a webstore there). But some how the library did not work.
Will have to dig more. Fedora team doesn’t have gstreamer-plugins-ugly anymore.
Rpmforge has gstreamer-plugins-ugly.
This being a test release, though, we can’t expect all the nice 3rd party rpms to be packaged yet.
Hope this helps anybody who want mp3 in F7
I found solution here http://dgoodwin.dangerouslyinc.com/fedora-7-test-2
You need to install livna’s repo rpm for FC6, disable livna, and enable livna-devel.
I hope this release lets you install the nvidia graphics driver.
Still a remarkable release with added SELinux policies for mozilla browsers and email programs:-)
If you want to install proprietary drivers, you can do that on any system if it is technically possible.
Fedora will however not do much to help you doing so.
The Fedora project is about delivering the best OS open source software can provide. A hundred percent open source, that is. There is simply no way for maintainers to support and debug binary drivers.
Fedora is not about conquering “the desktop”, nor about Linux world domination, nor about increasing market share at all cost.
In the mean time, Fedora has been a great OS for quite some time, and the base for RHEL/CentOS which is a rock solid system that works extremely well.
How can that be a coincidence?
Or is it just me?