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Fedora 12 beta code is go

Red Hat has announced the first and only beta of its next Linux development release, Fedora 12. Emperor Constantine the Great knew a good means to hold a crumbling empire together when he saw it - namely, Christianity - and by code-naming the 12th release of Fedora after Constantine, Red Hat is by no means suggesting that the …

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Adam Williamson 1
Linux

Not the 'first' beta, and a better feature list

This isn't the 'first' beta of F12, it's the only beta. The schedule includes an Alpha release, Beta release, internal release candidate builds, and final release. This release is roughly equivalent in terms of quality and stability to what was shipped as the Preview release for previous cycles.

It's disappointing you seemed to focus on some rather...esoteric features from the big feature list, rather than just printing or excerpting the list we provided with the Beta release announcement, which your readers can see here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F12_Beta_Announcement

we tried to focus that on the changes that would be most interesting to the widest cross section of users. Fedora is not primarily a server or enterprise product, it's a desktop distribution, and our careful selection of features to highlight was meant to reflect that. For instance, rather more current and prospective Fedora users are likely to be interested in the substantial changes in graphics and audio support than the virtualization stuff. Not that there's anything wrong with being a virtualization geek. =)

Adam Williamson

Fedora QA Community Monkey

Steve John

Great...

I like Fedora, did some development on it a couple of years ago, and found it OK.

By OK, it mean a mean of the following:

- Great: More responsive than XP on the other partition. Loved the multiple desktops.

- OK: Can't just poke around the UI for settings - have to look stuff up and open terminals (not a problem as such - I grew up with command line interfaces, just, well, aren't we past that now?).

- Poor: For all of these improvements mentioned in the article, will they make it "just work" with my laptop's inbuild wireless. Tried to install it at home, and everything went smoothly apart from the bloody wireless. After working at a PC all day, I just couldn't be bothered to put in the time to figure it out in the evening.

Justin Case

Fedora is Good

I love it. I use it. That's all.

Number6

HTML Install = ActiveX?

Not sure I like the idea of this one, installing stuff based on someone's dodgy web page. Sounds as good as allowing ActiveX where people don't care about what's happening, they'll just click OK and let anything install so they can see their porn. I hope it's going to be easy to remove/disable the browser plug-in.

Sometimes you don't want things to be too easy, especially as there aren't that many legitimate browser plug-ins, and most people only have to install them once per install anyway.

Anonymous Coward
Linux

Re: HTML Install = Activex?

No it's nothing like ActiveX, not even slightly. Not even that much. Less than that as well.

It's a way of a web page including a button to install or run an application locally. The example in http://cgit.freedesktop.org/packagekit/plain/contrib/browser-plugin/README shows a button that initially prompts you to install backgammon which the turns into a button to install it. The installation comes from an already configured repository and there's no way to pass command line arguments and whatnot to the application.

You might see this plugin on the GNU backgammon home page with something like "Fedora 12 users can download and install this from the Fedora 12 yum repo by clicking here". It's better than telling users to run various commands or click on such and such in some menu -- and aside from the security concerns mentioned in that README it's reasonably secure. (It's not perfect nothing is. If you tell some people to run su -c 'rm -rf /' and type their root password in they will do.

You didn't do that did you? Oh dear.

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