Monday, July 16, 2007

Proposed Fedora 8 Features

Source: Fedora 8 Proposed Features

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Fedora 8 is currently under development and is scheduled for release in November of this year (2007). This is a quick overview of the proposed features. As these are proposed features and as it is still about 4 months from release some of these will change.

Better Startup Graphical, smooth and polished startup

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This first feature is to bling up the boot sequence. Currently the boot sequence is a mix of text and graphical modes and doesn't look as professional as some of the other competing OS's logins. (Mac OSX, Windows, Ubuntu) This features calls for the hiding of some current boot up graphics such as the GRUB menu and ensuring that there is only one mode switch between text and graphical boot. This will help make the fedora (and the next RHEL) boot up slicker and adds a more professional image to the OS.

Bigboard Replacement for GNOME panel that uses online services via mugshot

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This next feature is about integrating the Mugshot Online Desktop Project's bigboard application. Bigboard is basically a sidebar for linux that partially replaces some of the top and bottom panel's functionality but with "greater emphasis to personalization, search, presence and contacts, and documents."

Codec Buddy Helper app promotes Free alternatives and guides users trying to play content under restricted codecs

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This is a similar feature to Ubuntu's automatic codec install. When a user tries to play an audio or video file with an uninstalled codec this feature will ask the user if they would like to install the relevant codec. It will also warn the user about illegal use of codecs and will try to educate the user. This is different from Ubuntu's auto codec install as it will recommend the purchase of Fluendo's gstreamer codecs, where as Ubuntu will install the "free" codecs after the user acknowledges that the codecs are illegal in some countries and should not be installed there. This feature will help with usability as often users are confused when they cannot play their audio or video files. This also goes along with Fedora's commitment to a completely free OS as they are pushing the completely legal alternative first.

KDE4 Integrating KDE 4.0, a new major version of KDE

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Not much has to be said about this feature as it explains itself. KDE 4 is going to be released in October and Fedora would like to incorporate it as the default KDE version into their 8th release. They are working hard on this feature as KDE 4 is highly desired and with the expected release of Fedora in November it will be one of the first distros to completely incorporate KDE 4. The Fedora developers are also working hard on ensuring compatibility with existing KDE 3 applications by shipping a full set of compatibility libraries.

NetworkManager System wide default network manager integration

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This is another feature that Ubuntu currently has. Fedora would like to integrate NetworkManager as the default network configuration method. NetworkManager was started by Red Hat and currently the easiest way to manage wireless networks. It is ideally suited for laptops with wireless cards. It also has plugins for different VPN implementations making it easy to use a VPN. The current weaknesses of the implementation is in the server market or with managing multiple network devices. Also there isn't any easy method to manage the networks without a GUI. Fedora is working on these issues and is hoping to implement NetworkManager as the default and only network manager for Fedora 8.

PolicyKit Easy and painless administration

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"PolicyKit provides a flexible framework for granting users access to privileged operations." This will help integrate the various ways distros allow desktop users to preform privileged operations. PolicyKit is completely integrated with HAL and DBUS and will provide a cutting edge desktop-environment agnostic method of securing the desktop. PolicyKit will also fix some implementation flaws of current methods of providing privileged operations to desktop users. (such as running X applications as root)

PulseAudio Feature rich sound server

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This is one of the most exciting features slated for inclusion in Fedora 8. PulseAudio is a sound server, which provides for network abstraction for sound. It also provides for full mixing of multiple audio streams and can be used to preform various effects on sound. PulseAudio allows for application independent volume control and also will allow any sound source or output to be shared or mixed over a network. For example with PulseAudio you can have Rhythmbox running of one computer but play the audio over the soundcard of a different computer on the network. It also will work for input allowing for a microphone input on one computer to be used on a different computer. This feature will bring the audio side of the linux desktop into the 21st century and will compliment the advanced visual effects available with Compiz and Compiz Fusion.

Presto Using delta RPM updates by default. Saves heavy amount of bandwidth and time for updates.

This is also an exciting new feature. Presto is a plugin for Yum to allow for the use of deltaRPM's to be downloaded instead of the full RPM's when updating. The current method of updating requires the full packages to be downloaded, this requires a lot of bandwith and often is not required as only a few files in the RPM package are changed. DeltaRPM's are much smaller as they only contain the differences between the two different packages. Currently there isn't an easy way to make use of these deltaRPM's and Presto hopes to change this. By using this plugin the bandwith required by a user to update is greatly decreased this will benefit the users with slow connections and will also decrease the infrastructure required to host a Fedora update mirror.

VirtSecurity Secure remote mangement for Xen, KVM & QEMU virtualization

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Currently in Fedora 7 and RHEL 5 their is no secure remote management of installed VM's. This feature will incorporate full TLS for all communication between the VM and the management applications. It also incorporates secure migration of guests across hosts.

Bookmarks Fedora 8 Bookmarks

This is a very basic feature that just states which bookmarks should be default in Firefox with Fedora 8.

TexLive TeXLive 2007 inclusion

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The current teTeX TeX distribution is no longer actively maintained and TeXLive is the new recommended TeX distribution. Debian and Ubuntu already are shipping TeXLive and this is a natural choice for any distribution that ships TeX.

Rsyslog New default syslog daemon

This feature calls for the inclusion of Rsyslog as a replacement for sysklogd. The sysklogd upstream is dead and also is missing a lot of requested features. Rsyslog has full security for logging (an often requested feature for sysklogd) and also can log to a MySQL database. Sysklogd is an ancient implmentation of the syslog functionality and is missing many requested features so upgrading is a no-brainer. There are several syslog replacements but Rsyslog is fully backwards compliant and provides most of the requested features and has an active upstream.

No More XFS Don't start XFS font server daemon by default and fix font packages. Savings on performance and bootup time.

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This feature would like to disable the x font server that is currently enabled by default in all installations. The two main reasons are it will accelerate the bootup process and that the use of an x font server is not required for most installations. This is almost a no brainier but needs some testing to ensure that this will achieve the desired results. Also this will require checking all programs that make use of the xfs to ensure they use the local fonts.

XULrunner Use and integrate XULRunner which is the Gecko browser engine separated from the user interface.

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Currently many applications depend upon Firefox just to make use of it's gecko rendering engine. XULrunner is a Mozilla project to separate the common features of Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, and any other gecko powered application into a separate program to make maintenance easier and to reduce duplication of code and functionality throughout their projects. This will require changes to many applications so that they use XULrunner instead of their own embedded gecko implementation. This will also increase security as if there is a vulnerability in the gecko engine it will be fixed in all programs that make use of it. This is another no-brainier as all distributions will eventually have to implement and the benefits are many.

Laptop Improvements Improved support for using Fedora on Laptops.

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This last proposed feature is a blanket feature to improve the Fedora experience on a laptop. This is basically just a improvement to the suspend/resume support and the special keyboard keys that are often on laptops. It also would like to see an improvement in battery life to the previous Fedora release.

So, that is a rundown of the features in the works for the next fedora release. Please check out the wiki pages for more details and future changes.

49 comments:

chillmatic100 said...

The screenshot under the KDE4 section is not KDE4 but a set of superkaramba applets running under KDE 3.5 called the Kuartet Desktop Project

I'm the author of Kuartet and it's not been in development for over a year. I suggest you post a KDE4 Alpha 2 screenshot to give readers an accurate view of what will be included with Fedora 8.

Source said...

I think Fedore Core is going in the right direction. I am not 100% sure about wireless support in Fedore Core "7" but that is a priority.

Anonymous said...

I propose a "NEW" feature: Fix the things that are wrong in Fedora 7 FIRST!!! I have no idea why Firefox CRASHES within minutes of starting it. FIX that problem FIRST before you go wandering off into the wild blue yonder. Fix it so VMServer works .

As far as your "new" features go.... as long as I can turn them off (or on) fine, I happen to like the "OK" "PASS" or "FAIL" on startup. At the very least leave that as the DEFAULT -- if somebody does not like it let them turn it off. If something goes wrong, I want to know what went wrong.

I don't want "BigBoard" by default, I don't want a "clippy" watching over my shoulder everytime I do something, I don't need Big Brother Redhat telling me what I can and can not do. If I want a Ubantu clone, I'll use Ubantu.

In short FIX THE THINGS THAT ARE WRONG IN FEDORA 7 FIRST .I'm sick and tired of buggy software. That is being rushed to market in an effort to be a "me too" distro.

peter.vk said...

Screenshot updated to an actual KDE4 shot.

peter.vk said...

anonymous: Have you filed bugs in the fedora bugzilla for your problems? Here is a site that helps users to submit the bugs they are encountering: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugsAndFeatureRequests

From the reviews I've read fedora 7 is a high quality distro so your comments are somewhat surprising.

BigBoard will definitely be an optional component. If you look at the actual feature page: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBigboard you will see that they are going to make an easy way to switch from the normal desktop to the online BigBoard desktop.

Anonymous said...

The inclusion of the ralink wireless driver was a plus in FC7. I found it works better than the separate driver I used in FC5.
But touchpads in lot's of laptops broke in FC7. They broke in Ubuntu also. Seems like the kernel thinks that a lot of them are Macintosh Mices.
Improving boot time would be nice.
I found adding early-login to the
boot string helps.

Anonymous said...

Java, Java and more Java. With all of the effort that went into open sourcing Java, I would really like to see it a priority to include the OpenJDK into Fedora. I have been a Fedora / Redhat user since Redhat 5 or something and a Java developer on Linux since Java 1.0. To make Fedora a good Java development environment the first the a person has to do is uninstall gcj and everything associated with it. Install the _real_ version of Java and start over with the real version of Eclipse, etc.

Please stop with this madness. I really appreciate all of the hard work that has gone in to classpath and gcj, but it is not what real Java developers need.

Thank you for a wonderful distro!

adel said...

In my country, we have nothing called software patents also law makes it very hard to person to have international credit card... don't throw users away to support vendors

peter.vk said...

adel: I don't completely understand your comment.

The upstream java sources (for java 7) have been released under the GPL so software patents are not an issue with java anymore. In fedora you can use a package called icedtea to install a fully free java. It uses the full GPL openJDK sources with just the minimum GNU Classpath code to make it work without the binary blobs.

Anonymous said...

When referring to the Network Manager integration you say "This is another feature that Ubuntu currently has" but no other distribution uses Network Manager system wide (ie) as the default stack for both desktop and servers. Ubuntu like Fedora in the live cd spin in previous release enables it by default. I would remove that sentence.

peter.vk said...

It is just a misunderstanding.

Ubuntu has enabled NetworkManager by default for the typical installation. By saying that Ubuntu already has this feature I mean that it is installed and enabled by default. Fedora does have a grander idea by using it to manage everything, but Ubuntu did offer NetworkManagers functionality by default first.

Anonymous said...

TeXLive:
Will the whole distribution be included? Because TeXLive is around one gb large.

If a stripped down version would be used, would it be easy to install the full version via yum install TeXLive-full ...?

Cheers!

peter.vk said...

The full TeXlive will be available to any Fedora 8 install through yum. I doubt fedora will install the entire distribution by default but it will be an option. Remember that core & extras have merged so fedora is now closer to debian in the size of the archive. This feature is just to include TeXlive in that archive. It may or may not be on the spins.

Anonymous said...

I completely agree with guy voting for real Java support. It is good to have gcj for a toy but not for real J2EE development. At least packages must be real java packages that can be run with normal JDK.

Fedora 7 is excellent desktop and with rpm.livna.org repository makes excellent multimedia workstation. But as developer workstation it needs a lot of "hand arts" to be useful.

Java is first thing but not the only one. KDevelop is semi-functional or semi-broken... other tools are not in the excellent shape too.

Dear Fedora developers! Please develop Fedora on Fedora to feel what I feel :)

I use RedHat from 3rd version, when Fedora was out I tried it and was pop-eyed my missing mp3 support and other strange things... Seems it is OK now with 3-rd party repositories, but novice just can't find livna.org!!!

Guys, please stop this madness and give at least clues for new user where to find things all users need!

Prude or dude? :)

Luya Tshimbalanga said...

Alex Lukin

GCJ was developed as Java alternative at the time the latter was not released under GPL license until now. OpenJava still have some binary blobs that contains part of code under proprietary license. It takes a long time to make Java fully open sources.

Fedora being a US distribution cannot afford to get trouble with US patents law by including patented codes. You should learn more about Microsoft being forced to pay fine of USD 1.5 billions for violating MP3 license. If you want Fedora to include them, ask those patent owners to grant unrestricted right to include and modify them.

Luya Tshimbalanga said...

alex lukin:

If you really want Fedora to include mp3 and other patented codecs, ask these patents owners to fully grant right to modify and redistribute the code. Until then, Fedora cannot afford to break US patent laws. Ask Microsoft how does it feel to pay USD 1.5 billion fine to mp3 patent owner.

Anonymous said...

I have no idea why firefox CRASHES 2.0.0.4 as well as 2.0.0.3] but it does. I've tried every trick in the book but it still crashes. With FC4 I did not have this problem -- same machine, same setup. Nor did I have any problem running VMServer. . I'm thinking of dropping back to FC6, but that was buggier than 7 (differnt bugs). Maybe it is time for Fedora to being so bleeding edge, and make sure that that everything works. Users should stop being beta testers for RHEL, which is several kernels back. It is one thing to be uptodate, with the latest and greatest, but it does nothing if it breaks something. Better to go a vbit slower making sure everything works than throwing every new software technology at users just so they can test it out. Stop trying to be a Ubuntu/Kubuntu clone.

Anonymous said...

I have been using Fedora on and off for quite some time and it has always impressed me. I am normally a source distro guy, but as a coder, just want something that works without too much fuss, but still allows me to tinker. Fedora gives me that. BUT...I am a hard-core Gnome fan and what's with the goofy panel replacement? If this panel thing actually makes it into version 8 and I can't turn it off, I will be switching back to Gentoo. All of the other improvements look nice though.

Anonymous said...

I think Fedora is heavy weight linux, it looks cool, but too heavy for old pcs, is there a light weight Fedora out there ?

Greetings

Luya Tshimbalanga said...

@ 5:39am: how about submitting a bug report if you have that issue?

@ 8:53am: you can still switch back to traditional panel.

peter.vk said...

"I think Fedora is heavy weight linux, it looks cool, but too heavy for old pcs, is there a light weight Fedora out there ?"

First off, I'd disagree that Fedora is heavy weight. The last time I ran it (Core 5) it was pretty slick.

If you do want a lightweight distro you can just install the xfce desktop for fedora. Most of the "weight" with modern distros is the desktop environment so switching to a "lighter" one would help.

If you really want to go fast, Arch Linux is said to be one of the fastest distros, but xubuntu is also pretty good.

Anyone else have some recommendations/opinions in this area?

peter.vk said...

Oh, as I am a huge Ubuntu fan and am biased. You could try fluxbuntu. It is ubuntu with the fluxbox window manager making it very fast.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous:
The problems with VMWare Server and Fedora 7 relate to the fact the VMWare Server doesn't build correctly on the kernel which Fedora 7 uses. There are several patches around, or you could wait for VMWare to update their product. However, it's not really a problem with Fedora 7, but with the application.

Anonymous said...

In all fairness, most of the beef I have is with the direction Gnome is taking. I am making the assumption that since the "BigGoofyBoard" thing is included, the new (conceptual) Gnome Online Desktop might also be included. To me, this is a deal breaker and I will be forced to switch to Xfce4 or a straight WM. KDE is totally unacceptable for the same reasons I have problems with the "BigGoofyBoard" thing. As Luya Tshimbalanga said - if we can switch back to the traditional panel, that will be fine.

Other than that, I like the system level improvements. It will be interesting to see how things turn out.

Anonymous said...

"the updater" is absolutely correct: it's not the distro that makes for bloat, but the desktop environment. Also, the number of services started during system boot contributes to slowness. Many of these can be turned off and are unnecessary. For older machines, Xfce4 is a great mix of functionality and speed.

The core GNU/Linux operating system, with no services running except essential ones, is basically the same from distro to distro. The added features and user tools that are added by the designers are what contributes to the size and system requirements of a given distro. It's a design trade-off: go for user friendliness or performance. Most modern hardware can handle anything thrown at it, but older hardware is perfectly useful with Linux: just choose the right number of services starting and a lightweight desktop.

joshuadf said...

As for "real" OpenJDK Java, Sun apparently forgot to change the license comments in some of the files, but until they officially remove the "SUN PROPRIETARY" from those problem files IcedTea is only being distributed as source. Discussions and instructions at openjdk.distro-packaging.devel

Unknown said...

What also could be optimized is the startup menu (Applications, System).
Sometimes it just takes too long for the icons besides the menu entries to be loaded. This could be a bit smoother.

Anonymous said...

I too would like to see the actual Sun JDK/JRE in Fedora 8.

I just wanted to ask if we'll be seeing Compiz Fusion with corresponding Fusion Icon & Settings Manager to handle desktop effects?

I've been using Compiz Fusion git packages courtesy of kagesenshi with Fedora 7 and over the past few weeks I've found them just as stable as F7's Compiz. I've also found performance to be a little bit better with Fusion.

Anonymous said...

First fix a buggy yum-updatesd (filled in bugzilla) ... then think about F8.

Anonymous said...

In reference to a previous post “propose a "NEW" feature: Fix the things that are wrong in Fedora 7 FIRST!”
There are a vast number of “most annoying bugs”, “features” and general problems that have existed for years, yet never get solved.
To be fair – I have used Fedora 7, but have gone back to CentOS 5. There was too little in Fedora 7 that I could use verses CentOS 5. (Read that as eagerly waiting to see if Fedora 8 is worthwhile)
Some of the issues mentioned might already be covered in the most recent updates to Fedora 7 and they might already be planned for Fedora 8. However, these items being so old in all RH products, I think the following list is still valid.
A very very brief list of these things:

Gnome:
1) Documention is sub standard by any definition. The Gnome manual is “Google”.
2) When I select places from the tool bar, I have home folder, desktop (not needed), Book marked folders, computer, dvd creator, network servers (even though I have none), Connect to server (again, none), search for files and finally, recent documents.
I have never found how to change the number of documents listed. More important, it is not obvious how to remove the “recent documents” listing and NOT have them cached.
The only GUI tool we have for these settings is gconf-editor. If it is in there, I have never found it – it too is poorly documented.
3) gconftool-2 is a good command line tool. However, the documentation on it is nothing less than wretched. Even with Google.
4) The screen saver picture directory: Now this one has a huge number of complaints about it. From the screen saver GUI you can select a picture folder, but there is no way to specify where that folder is. Actually, it will not even tell you where the default folder is. Eventually a determined user will figure out is is ~/.Pictures. A very determined Google hunter might possibly figure out that the directory is specified in the file:
/usr/share/applications/screensavers/personal-slideshow.desktop
Buried in that file you can find the default directory for the pictures. Even so, the main complaint is that there is NO way to recursively pull images from that location.
This leaves the user to make his own hack to populate the directory with the files he wants.
This complaint goes back years and there is no excuse for it – none.

Nautilus:
To give a little credit, sometimes bad Nautilus behavior does get corrected. With FC5, if you deleted a directory that had the focus, Nautilus would slam shut. Very annoying when you were 10 levels deep moving files or directories. For FC6 that was corrected and now at least it does not slam shut and the focus moves to the trash in that case. But it took how many years to fix that?
1) Tree View: Some places it is called tree view, others Browser view. Very confusing for new users. This is a usability issue. This is especially true because the default on all Red Hat products is to use a view that is a graphical equal to “ls”.
Command line guys (traditional Unix / Linux users), might like this default view. However, back in the days of Dos, the majority of users despised the output of “Dir”. Eventually an add on product called “Xtree” came to the market. It was SO WELL accepted and so much better, it became the standard view – a tree view. Over 90% of computer users understand the Tree View, the vast majority of those find the view Red Hat uses as a default to be abhorrent.
The least that can be done is make it easy for new users to get a view they understand.
Think Usability. Don't mix terminology, make the tree view easy for new users to find.
2) Hidden files and Folders. The selection says “Show hidden files”, but what you actually get is show hidden folders or files that begin with “.” . Only if you go into the settings can you also turn on show hidden backup files WITH hidden files.
This is an issue because things like Gedit make ~ backup files by default. If you don't see them and you are not aware of what applications are making these, they accumulate all over the system over time. They also tend to get stuffed into tar files when you tar up a directory.
Using Find, I have cleaned out hundreds of Meg of useless backup files.
For usability, there should be an entry in preferences for “Show backup files”.
3) Thumbnails: Now here is one you can find a massive amount of complaints on.
Nautilus NEVER removes a thumbnail file. As such, it saves them even from movable media and it continues to make copies as files and directories get moved around. On a file server, this is a non-issue. On a desktop with tens or like mine, hundreds of thousands of images, this grows to Gigabytes. They never get purged, there is NO setting to delete thumbnails when the application closes.
3a) What most bitterly complain about is that there is no option to select the size of the thumbnail. And NO, 150% zoom for a blurry picture is NOT a solution.
Off hand, I forgot the default size for thumbnails (128?). With an 800x600 resolution, the default is not bad. Up at 1280 x 1024 and moving towards 1600x1200, those thumbnails get smaller all the time. This is a serious usability problem and many have complained about it for years.

Screen goes blank watching a movie:
Fedora and Ubuntu forums have this complaint. It is not the screen saver kicking in, it is the monitor shutting off. In brief, the solution that works all depends on the Video card and driver combination in use. As you mix and match the cards and drivers, the solution that works changes. For some, setting DPMS False in the xorg.conf file will work. For others, even if you set that, when you query the settings with xset, it is back on! To correct the bad behavior of shutting off your monitor when watching a movie many have to resort to making an .xinitrc.sh file and add that to the startup applications (after the init scripts have run).
xset -dpms
xset s 0
xset s noblank
In that file, the above commands are usually enough to force the screen to remain on.
Using Gnome power management and setting the display sleep to never – does not work.
Another hack that works for some (depending on the combination again), is to go into gconf-editor, find the monitor sleep settings and change the number to 7200 seconds (2 hours) or as mine is set, 99999 seconds. When Gnome power manager sets it to never, it is set to zero and that does nothing, it gets ignored.
But the above just illustrate the hacks to make it work. Gnome need to be smart enough to know a movie is playing – and do not shut off the monitor.
If you are going to have power saving / monitoring in Gnome, it should work – and for many it does not.

Feature, Encrypted /Root. Whole disk encryption.
One might think this is a priority for Red Hat. They already claim to work with the NSA in developing SELinux for security. US Government mandate is that all Government laptops have full disk encryption – laptops get lost and stolen. Without this feature, Red Hat misses the world largest customer...
This feature has been working in one form or another since May 2004 !!!
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=124789
Even so, mkinitrd has still not incorporated the patch. Anyone that wants to use this feature still has to get the source, patch it, build the rpm, then make a new initrd.
Since this is still not done after 3 years – there is of course no check box in Disk Druid to make a default Encrypted system.
I.E. Non encrypted /boot, encrypted swap (with password for laptop users wanting hibernate, random password for desktops), encrypted /root – preferably setup as an LVM. (Using dmcrypt and device mapper anyway)
The final touch – have Disk Druid ask where you want to store the LUKS key – on the disk or on a removable device.

All the tools are available – where is the coordinated product to keep our data safe from physical theft?

The above is a very brief list of ancient issues, there are many more.
There are many of us, that when we see a new feature like “Big Board”, we do not want that on our desk top any more than we want “Big Bird” on our desktop. If it can be turned off – we will just suffer in silence knowing more useless code and bloat is built in. And we will just keep shaking our heads in disbelief that talent and resources can be expended on that when there are so many old issues outstanding.

Fedora needs a “Bug Triage” edition.

Anonymous said...

Farlander, I completely quote your message!

Anonymous said...

I totally agree with farlander on the movie/screensaver issue.
There should be a easy way to disable everything that could make the screen go blank. It is embarrassing when you hold a presentation and the beamer goes dark and somebody tells you that they cant see what your talking about.

NetworkManager is great, but there is still room for improvement. Sometimes it is not done with connecting to a wireless network, you also need to connect to a vpn and change proxy settings before you're really "online". this could be done automatically and should be imho.

And the services started by default should be changed but afaik this is known by everyone and probably on the list already.

JP Loh said...

I hope suspend/resume works again and maybe faster init (runit perhaps?).

Anonymous said...

what about KDE issue????

fedora 7 is a first edition Im running with fc repo packages not an unofficial ones :)))... its a slite improvement however the problem still exists!!! integration and tuning of different desktops....
ubuntu solve that problem by the way they designed the software: basic-system+ubuntu-desktop+kubuntu-desktop+xubuntu-desktop

the question is fc would follow the ubuntu way or find antoher???... the worse is still developing only gnome oriented distro as it was since the beginig...

kde simply lacks some fedora deeply featured packages...

Anonymous said...

I'd like to see Alpine included with Fedora 8. It's the new Pine, but with an open-source license, and lots of improvements.

Anonymous said...

I just hope that the old firewire stack (raw1394, etc) be included in Fedora 8.

Anonymous said...

Please add HBA support from Emulex & Qlogic - This is a huge issue - having to compile separate kernels becomes time consuming especially if your trying to build/manage a 200+ linux shop - development purposes. Would prefer to stick with Fedora.

Anonymous said...

Please work on fixing the bugs in evolution. I work at a large company with many people using different versions of Linux. The people I talk to have similar problems with evolution crashing. For Linux to be accept in a workplace setting we need a reliable email reader using exchange. Several times a day evolution crashes and I must restart it. I can't wait to see Fedora 8 with KDE 4.

Anonymous said...

Please work on fixing the bugs in evolution. I work at a large company with many people using different versions of Linux. The people I talk to have similar problems with evolution crashing. For Linux to be accept in a workplace setting we need a reliable email reader using exchange. Several times a day evolution crashes and I must restart it. I can't wait to see Fedora 8 with KDE 4.

Harshit said...

I am a big fan of fedora not only because it works great, but it also gives me new and great things to use.
I recently used blackbox with fedora. it works great and my system transformed to a superfast computer.
also i used VMware server with fedora .it is good.
No bugs encountered except for Xen which i am unable to start
also kde is great.
Eagerly waiting for fedora 8.

Anonymous said...

I was very glad to see that dialup is fixed. The previous 7 version wouldn't work with a basic USR 56K external modem, I loaded the machine with 8 live beta3 and it worked like a charm.

Anonymous said...

Really, though I am just a kid annoyed by windows, Fedora 8 could have an easier way to connect the internet to your computer.

Anonymous said...

Just a quick note on how to get gnome personal folder for screensaver and make it work! If you edit the file /usr/share/applications/screensavers/personal-slideshow.desktop file and change the execute slideshow entry to point to your folder containing the pictures you wish it to use recursively, then it does work (under Centos 5) i.e. change
Exec=slideshow --location=Pictures
to
Exec=slideshow--location=/home/!me!/mypics
where !me! is your user!
Thanks though - as without this blog, I probably would never have found it and got it working....

Anonymous said...

there was an issue making faster the shut-down in Fedora 7 development which unfortunately finaly was not included into the distro. And perhaps some others. Don't you think these tasks once started could be also solved, though one distro later then scheduled?

Anonymous said...

I'm just bought a new laptop and I was not able to install fedora because of "No found device" issue, like this
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?p=886846#post886846

I hope that this will be fixed in fedora 8.

I hope that all new feature will be available for fluxbox (I realized that
network manager was only for gnome desktop
manager)

Massimo

P.S.: Actually I was downloading the ubuntu distro after the problem with "no driver found", but then I realized that
the 7th November there will be available F8 .. and .. moreover ... it's my birthday, so I decide to just wait and see what kind of present I'm going to obtain

Slim Revenge said...

id like to see some wireless support, right now im stuck with vista on my new laptop because i cant find any drivers for my broadcom wireless card in f7

Unknown said...

A french review :

http://www.tux-planet.fr/blog/?2007/11/08/203-fedora-8

Anonymous said...

"This first feature is to bling up the boot sequence. Currently the boot sequence is a mix of text and graphical modes and doesn't look as professional as some of the other competing OS's logins. (Mac OSX, Windows, Ubuntu) This features calls for the hiding of some current boot up graphics such as the GRUB menu and ensuring that there is only one mode switch between text and graphical boot."

I seriously I think this is a stupid reason!! really who cares about bling blinging a boot up scene just to make it look attractive. I think the text boot up mode looks more geekish and true linux-ish compare to a fancy colorful boot screen trying to copy winblow and ubuntu.

Worrying about useless features like this and trying to make it look more like winblows is a turn off. stop trying to make linux look more winblowish/ubuntu-ish,
Let linux be linux, the way its always suppose to be.

Anonymous said...

So far, I like what I see in Fedora 8! What I have not seen that I would like to see is:

1) 3D desktop, and

2) a 'Configure Your System' (such as is found in PCLOS and other such distros), and

3) WiFi support (I have a Belkin USB WiFi and Fedora does not detect it, whereas PCLOS and Ubuntu (so far I've yet to try other distros on it)


I am debating on installing Fedora 8 - I am using the Live CD to evaluate Fedora.

Good job (so far), people, on Fedora 8!!! ;)

QBall