Oh My Goddard! An Early Look at Fedora 13
2:46 PM in Open Source, Operating System by Guy Buddy
It might not have as much bling as Ubuntu, but Fedora still has a lot to offer. While the former focuses primarily on making life easier for new users (and generally does a great job at that), Fedora has been concentrating on the underlying technology and making the best possible entirely free operating system.
Back in February this year, some important project-wide development changes came to the Fedora project. Currently, the development pace of Rawhide (Fedora’s testing branch) slows the closer the project comes to a new release, slowing down the overall development pace of the project. This new development change will adopt a new approach, similar to that of Debian. Rawhide will always continue to be developed at breakneck speed, while a new testing branch will be created which will slow and in time become the new stable release. This will mean that future versions of Fedora to be managed even more efficiently, while allowing the project to continue developing at full speed.
It’s getting close to that time again, when another Fedora release will grace our mirrors and call out to be installed on all your hardware.
Underlying Features
All distributions are driven by specific goals, and Fedora certainly has a very business-centric view of the world. The projects is always pushing the envelope to create the best possible free operating system, often building and introducing technology long before any other. It’s great to know that it’s not just shiny stuff, but great free technology under the hood which is driving us all forward.
GNOME 2.30 desktop
Fedora 12 “Constantine” is the current release, but will very shortly be replaced by “Goddard”. The development team has been very ambitious lately with the last number of releases having a huge number of major new features. This new release should see a total 48 (all of which are already 100% implemented), just 4 less than Constantine.
While some of these include updates to the latest version of GNOME or KDE, others are much more bleeding edge. Some of these include snapshot support for btrfs (which comes as a file system option) and Zarafa, a free software replacement for Microsoft Exchange which sits on top of existing mail systems, such as Postfix. It has lots of extra goodies including an advanced web interface and synchronization support for mobile devices.
Zarafa – replacement for Exchange
Also innovative in this release is automatic printer installation. Rather than have every printer driver under the sun installed by default, Fedora will instead detect when a printer is plugged in and automatically install the correct system drivers. Now that’s plug ‘n print! Color management will makes its mark in this release, which will allow users to adjust the color profiles on their system and adjust accordingly. This means you can match the colour of a recently scanned picture and ensure images will print correctly. This is a feature often touted on the Mac platform, and something which is sorely needed for graphical work on Linux.
Color profile tool
NetworkManager will finally get a command-line interface as well as integrated support for Bluetooth Dial Up Networking – finally, seamless tethering! It will also show signal strength for supported cellular wireless devices and whether the connection is roaming or not. The Palimpsest disk utility has also received a major overhaul, including improved S.M.A.R.T reporting, support for LVM device mapper drives and disk benchmarking. Also new in this release is an updated user tool for managing users on small to medium sized systems.
Account management tool
More, More, More…
A free “Skype replacement” is on the way, thanks to GNU Telephony. The first step for Fedora is to include the GNU Sip Witch, a daemon which:
“Enables an entirely free software alternative to Skype using standard IETF protocols along with support for direct peer-to-peer secure communications such as possible with ZRTP capable softphones and without need for a mitigating “service provider”. Instead, DNS will be used for directly resolving SIP uri’s and each user or organization will construct the network directly from the bottom-up running a sipwitch service daemon to answer and route calls for their users or on individual workstations, and do so while using existing standard compliant VoIP clients such as Empathy, Twinkle, SIP Communicator, local SIP devices, etc, as they prefer.”
Support for 3D will be enabled by default for all NVIDIA based cards, using the free Nouveau driver. It will also support the Display Port connection interface, along with Intel (from Fedora 12) and Radeon based cards. KDE will have native Qt authentication via Package Kit One. This will provide a more seamless KDE desktop experience when requiring authentication dialogs, such as modifying modules in System Settings. This release will also see a much improved storage management component for the installer, as well as the option to install a minimal system! (Previously this was achieved by deselecting all packages to be installed.)
Fedora has been slowly removing applications written in Microsoft’s .NET which run on Novell’s Mono stack, due to concerns over freedom. In Fedora 12, the note taking program Tomboy was replaced with Gnote but photo manager F-Spot was still included by default. In this new release, it has been replaced by Shotwell, a GNOME application written in Vala. While Mono and various .NET applications are still available in the repositories, this means that Fedora is finally free of Mono for default installs.
Pulling Features
It’s not just Red Hat employees and Fedora community members contributing to this release. In the true spirit of open source, Fedora has adopted several key projects from other distributions such as Ubuntu and Mandriva.
It looks like Pulseaudio is here to stay and Fedora 13 will support for it in KDE with Phonon, thanks to work done by Mandriva. Upstart is one of the major system-level applications which Fedora has adopted from Ubuntu. In this new release, they will upgrade to version 0.6. When Fedora will completely switch to an event driven init system is not known. Fedora has also snatched up two other programs, the first of which is Simple Scan. Also making its début in Ubuntu Lucid 10.04, Simple Scan is exactly what it sounds like, a simple scanning program. For too long, scanning tools under Linux have been somewhat complicated (although the SANE back-end has been brilliant). Now, with Simple Scan, users can have a simple, convenient and attractive tool to accomplish this task!
Simple Scan, the new simple scanning tool
The other is a backup tool called Déjà Dup. It’s another simplistic program which can schedule incremental, encrypted backups to a number of locations, such as a local drive, network share or even Amazon’s S3 cloud service. This is a great addition to the Linux desktop, something which is log overdue and should improve quickly with time.
Déjà Dup incremental backup tool
Back up in progress..
Fedora does tend to focus on improving the back end, rather than user space. No doubt there are other components of Fedora which have their genesis in other distros and it’s great to see great features been shared and adopted all around. Keep it up!
The Road Ahead
Fedora has very different goals to many other distros when it comes to creating a Linux based operating system. They stick to the principles of software freedom, creating the best possible operating system without resorting to proprietary software. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you can’t install such packages. On the contrary, the RPM Fusion repository can provide just about any non-Free (or patent encumbered) program you might require. There are also Spins available, such as Omega, which configure all this out of the box!
It’s great to see Fedora improving situations such as as those we find with NVIDIA, by creating a free 3D driver rather than resorting to the support of closed source binaries. Thank goodness we have Fedora there, protecting our freedoms and creating a phenomenal operating system every 6 months from which we all benefit (just think where we would be without their contributions like NetworkManager and other core components).
The effort that the community continues to put into each and every day truly makes for great, feature-full releases. To you we must say thank you – we appreciate all of your hard work! If you’re a user who’s never tried Fedora, why not give this exciting new release a try? It might not have as much bling as Ubuntu, but it’s a rock solid release based on the best free software has to offer.
