some quick notes on Fedora 8 test 3

Posted on by Luis Villa

Having had a good week, I’m playing with toys a little bit today. (Sadly, not enough free time to make it to GNOME Summit.)1 Some notes, forthwith, from Fedora 8 test 3, with a few supplements as well from a month old Ubuntu Tribe CD.2

  • There is no F8 test3 version in bugzilla. Oops.
  • thinkpad volume keys still broken by default. The most popular line of laptops in the world, guys. And supported out of the box in Ubuntu for a couple of years now. Can’t find this in an open bug, so have filed a new one.3
  • No sign that RH bug 247468 is fixed either, though obviously can’t test that with a liveCD. Every single time I reboot or change the volume these two bugs remind me that in some ways Fedora 7 was a downgrade from Ubuntu c. 2005.
  • still the old, lousy run dialog by default on alt+f2. I would have thought by now that the benefits of binding this to deskbar instead by default would be obvious. (Not Fedora’s fault; more of a GNOME problem. Still sad, especially given that the 2.20 version of the deskbar applet is just as fast as the old dialog.)
  • network manager enabled by default (at least on the livecd.) yay!
  • all tablet functionality still busted by default in Fedora- no rotation and no stylus. Stylus works in Ubuntu’s month-old build, but no rotation there either.
  • new ‘appearance’ capplet is swanky. I do find it amusing that both the Fedora and Ubuntu defaults are apparently ‘custom’. Generally, the new Fedora artwork is great- subtle, professional, very nice.
  • Boot and login feel blazingly fast- I have no idea if this is because I’m reading off a solid-state drive instead of a traditional hard drive, or what, but if it actually holds up, that would be great. Power usage also seems to have improved, according to powertop, though again perhaps because of harddrive usage. Either way, makes me want to upgrade to a SSD ASAP.
  • Once I installed the online-desktop preview, I was impressed. Still some rough edges- most notably that I can’t figure out how to hide it, which sucks on my tiny laptop monitor- but otherwise impressive. Now, we just need someone working on free alternatives for some of the server-side bits.4
  • RH bug 221546 is finally fixed, which is not huge, but nice (especially since it has been broken since F5 or so.)
  • muine works out of the box; it is completely busted in current Ubuntu gutsy. Chalk one up for Fedora on quality/stability.
  • Installing OOo-writer seems to make the liveCD/usb combo barf all over itself- I assume this is something filling up and failing poorly, but I have no idea how to confirm that. So I’ll stick with google docs for my afternoon classwork. Sadly, means I won’t upgrade right now, since I absolutely must have a working OOo and if I can’t test it, I won’t upgrade.
  1. On the plus side, I think I can make it to GUADEC this year. [↩]
  2. Note that fedora makes it very easy to turn a liveCD iso into a USB key (one command line); Ubuntu’s equivalent process is poorly documented and awkward, which is why I haven’t bothered to test a new Ubuntu Tribe as well. [↩]
  3. Could have sworn there was an open bug, but if there was, it has been closed without the problem actually being fixed. [↩]
  4. perhaps someone needs to take a look at installing Joyent Connector at gnome.org? [↩]

Published by Luis Villa

12 thoughts on “some quick notes on Fedora 8 test 3”

  1. In the footnotes of a recent post Luis Villasays“fedora makes it very easy to turn a liveCD iso into a USB key (one command line); Ubuntu’s equivalent process is poorly documented and awkward, which is why I haven’t bothered to test a new Ubuntu Tribe as well

  2. There could very well be difference in boot up time caused by solid state. Random access performs better on solid state compared to mechanical harddisk.

    I/O on boot is mainly random access.

  4. You can hide the online desktop sidebar by clicking on the top right area which has your userpic and name. This will open a preferences menu with “Minimize sidebar” as one of the options. Clicking on the icon with your userpic in the bottom left corner or on the ‘Menu’ key will bring the sidebar back up temporarily, You can choose ‘Show sidebar’ from the same preferences menu to leave it up again.

    We have mockups to make it more intuitive that the top area on the sidebar is clickable, and will have it in very soon.

  5. “muine works out of the box; it is completely busted in current Ubuntu gutsy. Chalk one up for Fedora on quality/stability”

    Thats going a little too far isnt it, making judgement on the quality of a distro based upon the status of muine?

  6. Chalk *one* up, john, not ‘Fedora rulez doood!’

    If you re-read the rest of the note, you’ll note I have a long list of very serious problems with Fedora, some of which I’ve been bitching about for months.

  7. If by bug 247468, you mean ‘NAS is a broken pile that someone thought it was a good idea to build support into arts for’, no, that’s apparently not fixed. Volume is saved and restored (and works) as it always has been since 2001.

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