Fedora 12 polishes Linux for netbooks The Fedora Project has released the first beta of Fedora 12, the next major revision of the Fedora Linux line, and though it's still a work in progress, there are already some standout features, including a much improved power management system and support for the Moblin project, Intel's effort to make Linux work better on …
This will be so cool! And so much better than Xandros! 100 guys will actually use it. There will be all sorts of "packages", "distros", "toolkits" to hunt for, and there will even be some drivers, for some devices, if you know where to look. Maybe even support in fhe form of a forum where first-time Linux users can be told to "read the MAN pages". It's the giant-killer!
Thanks for the review! One note - since you just mention Broadcom wireless in passing as 'still an issue', I'd like to mention that F12 actually takes a first step to address this, including the b43-openfwwf open firmware by default. This is a project to write an open source firmware lump for Broadcom cards, so the existing b43 driver will work without the previously-required manual extraction of the firmware from a Windows driver.
I won't lie - it's pretty damn early code at the moment, but it has actually been reported to more or less work by at *least* two whole people. :) At worst, it's not any worse than the previous out of the box experience, which was 'no broadcom for you, hippy'. So if you have a Broadcom wireless adapter, before you go install the closed firmware or the closed wl driver or whatever, just see if it maybe actually works without. Probably it won't, but hey, can't hurt to give it a shot.
openfwwf should get a lot more mature in future releases. Hopefully.
I hope they've made similar performance increases as there were from fedora 10 - 11, my AA1 is really fast now. However, there are still a few significant problems, most noteable for me is the Atheros driver which dies at random intervals from a couple of minutes to several hours, requiring a full powerdown to get it going again. It wasn't a problem in Fedora 10, only 11 so must be software related. Having said that - one of the two wireless card's LEDs have been implemented in the driver, so there is some progress...
Oh, give us a bit of Slack, from Ware you're at will ya? (preferably on 24 floppy disks - 5½" preferred)
Can't beat a good linux distribution. Bit like an egg and a fuc*k. "You can beat an egg, but..."
Don't knock it until you've tried it - Fedora 12, I mean. I doubt if you've done the other two I mentioned.
I've been trying Kubuntu 9.10 for a couple of weeks and I have to say that the KPackageKit *is* crap.
This one thing may make me stick with the latest Ubuntu with Synaptic.
The KDE team seem to be trying to emulate Vista, bad idea!
As for Broadcom I just click on "Use Proprietary driver" and it works.
In your review it would be good if you tried to print a high quality image and see if works.
I still have to print from XP for any art-work to look OK.
Pay *me* and I will do it for you :)
Can't print decent quality from Ubuntu eh?
I can't talk about *buntu but I certainly use Fedora 11 & now F-12 to print large panoramas. I printed one today from the F12 Beta I just installed on a 4yr old Mac Mini. It was over 8ft long and on Photo Glossy paper. Something that the combination of crappy O/S (Vista) & equally crappy Drivers(Epson) can't do.
Fedora is a beta OS, always. It's endlessly evolving and on each new release you really need to wipe the system and start again, and that's every few months! I couldn't keep up with Fedora, it's too much hassle.
As for netbook support, well I found notebook support was flaky unless you had perfectly linux compatible hardware, and due to the exclusion of certain items due to legal issues, I had to hunt down relevant drivers to get everything working, along with a lot of mucking about with command prompts, scripts and recompiling the kernel. Still couldn't get the wifi working properly. Not acceptable for Joe Public, but I wouldn't recommend Joe Public goes anywhere near Fedora anyway. Latest and greatest it may be, but it's really a beta OS that will never be released (unless you could RHEL as the release version).
For a polished netbook linux OS, check out Jolicloud. The UI is a bit radical but it takes advantage of the small screen and the nature and typical use of a netbook to provide what most users would want and not what they don't need (and avoids command prompts and scripts as much as possible). Plus they support specific netbook brands and try to ensure all the components work.
You don't need to install every Fedora release. Each release has a supported life cycle of 13 months (in other words, until shortly after the next-release-but-one comes out - so if you install Fedora X, you can choose to completely skip Fedora X+1 and update to Fedora X+2 soon after it comes out, if you like).
You don't need to do a clean installation to upgrade to a new Fedora release. You can do an upgrade install from the installation disc, or use preupgrade. You can even upgrade using yum, although that's not officially supported. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading for more details.
Most drivers that do not ship as part of Fedora itself for legal or policy reasons are available from RPM Fusion, http://www.rpmfusion.org/ . There's no need to recompile the kernel or 'muck about' with any command prompts or scripts to install any of the drivers available there.
> "the latest version of Xorg that now defaults to, for those of you with a dual monitor setup, spanning the desktop between monitors, rather than cloning between them. Quite frankly, that's the way it should have been from the beginning, but as they say, better late than never."
So be it, but if "dual monitor" is a notebook or netbook with a projector plugged in to the VGA port, then this is very definitely a retrograde step! (Perfection would be auto-detecting whether what's on the VGA port is a projector or a monitor, but I don't know if that's even possible).
I just hope that finding one's way back into clone mode is easier than it is with Windows XP.
Why do *buntu fanbois troll on Fedora news items?
Fuck off.
I won't be upgrading to F12 (running F11 on my Dell lappy here in Germany, F9 on my desktop back in Blighty, and I've been using odd-numbered releases since F7), but I do see F13 in my near future.
I must say, I am impressed by the boot time for F11. Nice as it is to see the boot sequence scroll up my screen, I do appreciate the swiftness and the modernity of the splash screen.
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