The 14th edition beta of Fedora has been out for a while now. It has been a pleasure to test this version out on a IBM Thinkpad a31P for about a good month or so. I normally run Debian, and right now I’m running Squeeze on a dual core Acer Aspire desktop from 2006. As long as these machines do what they need to, there really is no need for me to upgrade them. Some people seem to think that their wants are their needs and end up spending a ton of money on expensive equipment. Maybe if you are a pc gamer or really need to run that hog of a memory sucking app, probably written in Java, it is justified to upgrade every time Moore’s law is in effect. Which according to Gordon Moore is no more……………… oh shit now what ? OK, you might have another 20 or so years before disaster happens.
Anyhow, I digressed from the matter. Fedora 14 beta installed flawlessly on my reliable older hardware with all the GUI glamor you’d expect from a modern distribution of GNU/Linux. Not really an issue for me being used to the Debian installer, which for most of my installs on servers works just fine. Of course no Squeeze on the servers, only stable for those babies. Smooth sailing all the way from installer to finished install and log-in to a Gnome desktop. Gnome seems like a no frills desktop out of the box without all the Compiz madness. The artwork is nothing short of smashing.
Then it started raining kernel oops paging errors on my parade. I wouldn’t have noticed if the automatic bug report tool had not waved the red flags at me, well maybe in time at a boot message, but really? Just so you know, the bugs you report in Fedora are handled very fast indeed, in about a week my issue got resolved by upgrade. You cannot say that Fedora/ Red Hat developers are slow at all. Did I say that reporting a bug is also real easy with this tool! I just needed to register for a free Bugzilla account at Red Hat. I think that ‘s pretty neat. As for the fresh install applications, there are the usual suspects from firewall and security tools to a full office suite, it is al there baby. Most of the newness lies under the hood in this pre-release.
A more revolutionary change like systemd has been postponed to a later 15 release but the implementation of the OpenSCAP framework is in progress. The framework should bring a standard to system maintenance and security reporting. FirstAidkit anybody, yes please? Plenty of these engine upgrades going on, very exciting stuff with Xen virtualization and migration to kvm. But forget to boot as a DomO only UN-priviledged guests can be booted. Not so strange since Red Hat develops kvm in house. You have to go back to Fedora8 for booting into the Dom0 according to the release notes.
Think I will experiment a little with kvm here shortly. Xen runs on one of the servers at work and that has given me some experience with virtualization. Perhaps a more hands- on technical article about it later. To think I missed all the exciting LUG meetings here locally due to classes which always fall on Tuesday nights, darnit. So, plenty of new things to play with the coming months. All in all a real positive experience. Good job by the Fedora community, seems al good and well for next weeks release.
