Derek Hildreth’s Blog

Fedora 9 Sulphur Beta Smells a Little

So, I took a leap and decided to install Fedora 9 yesterday hoping to reap the benefits of Gnome 2.22 and the latest and greatest in general. What I found though is a mess of bugs. I understand that this is only a release for the early adopters, but I figured it would be a little more polished than this.  And by “this” I mean that upon install on my laptop, the:

• backlight was off (fixed after updates).
• multimedia keys don’t function (fixed after updates).
• webcam doesn’t work with cheese.
• package manager freaked out on sight of 300+ updates on fresh install and hung itself (after a restart, things were okay again).
• package manager wouldn’t uninstall anything.
• package manager spits out an error message when clicking on any category.
• desktop effects worked at first, but then were destroyed by the updates.
• backup/restore feature in evolution is worthless (maybe not Fedora’s fault).
• flash player doesn’t really play any flash.
• “restore from trash” feature that’s supposed to be included in Gnome 2.22 isn’t anywhere to be found.

It’s not an exhaustive list of the little things I noticed, but I just wasn’t expecting to run into any hurdles for some reason (even though it’s beta software). I guess I should have known better.

But, it’s not all bad. I’m more of a “half-full” kinda guy and so I would like to go over the things that give me a reason to keep it on my desktop:

• Clock and Weather have been merged together [Gnome].

• PackageKit is extremely simple.  I click “apply updates” and I only see that it’s doing it’s thing.  I can choose to go in and see what it’s going to install as well (for those users who are curious).

• The famous “Locations” map is pretty slick looking [Gnome].

• Finally, a more detailed description of what’s happening during file transfers [Gnome].

• Avant Window Navigator and it’s extras are easy to install through Add/Remove Programs.

• Mouse preferences are extensive (but no simple “disable click on tap” function yet for us laptop users).

• As always, the default theme for Fedora is nice.

There are a lot more features than that, but those are some highlights that I wanted to share. I hope you enjoyed the mini-review!

Tags: beta, fedora, fedora 9, install, Linux, review

Fedora 9: An Artwork Review

Mairin Duffy has outdone herself this round with the artwork she has dedicated to the Fedora 9 project. She, with help from others, has come up with a theme based around the nickname of the release: Sulfur. With a green-tinted block of sulfur and some relaxing waves, the Fedora 9 theme is shaping up to be very nice. The overall scheme of the theme has changed to darker colors since Fedora 8, which seems to be going right along with the trend I’ve been seeing lately. Personally, I enjoy the “darker” colors, but only to an extent. I don’t want to feel like I’m in a pit of depression whenever I login.

In Artwork Round 3, she has made a change to the black/gray/yellow colors from Artwork Round 2 (see image to right) to darker blues and yellows (see image to left). I’m actually disappointed in that decision, but she’s the artist and I’ll let her do her thing. If it were me, I would have kept the grays instead of going with the blues. Undoubtedly, I would still choose this design over any of the others submitted.

There is one other item that I’m concerned about with the artwork this round. That is, it’s themed around a piece of sulfur. I hope that this doesn’t confuse the newcomers into thinking that it’s more than just a nickname. That’s all it is, a nickname. The main focus of Fedora shouldn’t be a block of sulfur, it should probably be just “Fedora - Infinity, Freedom, and Voice“. But, that’s just my humble opinion.

Tags: artwork, blog, fedora, fedora 9, final, final artwork, Mairin Duffy, review, Round 2, Round 3

Fedora 9 Dumps CodecBuddy

I just read about this over at LWN.net and it’s a bitter-sweet emotion for myself.

Basically, the CodecBuddy gave users the option to purchase and download codecs that would allow playback of popular media files that are otherwise illegal to us folks in the states like mp3, wmv, mov, and mpeg files. The CodecBuddy (aka Codeina) included in Fedora 8 would prompt a user to purchase proper codecs when they tried to play a particular file such as an mpeg video and directed them to the Fluendo website.

Now that the Fedora Project Board decided to scrap the inclusion of CodecBuddy in Fedora 9, I feel that the decision as a whole was a good one. The CodecBuddy didn’t actually work as planned anyways and most users of Fedora already know that there are free codecs available from the gstreamer family. The only unfortunate side of this particular family is that its legality is somewhat in a gray area.

On the other hand, I feel that it was a great opportunity for some relatively cheap codecs that might actually produce a better result in multimedia quality than what gstreamer currently has. Gstreamer is great and it gets the job done, but a lot of times I’ve found that it’s a bit of a hit-and-miss. For example, I still can’t play .avi files on my machine without terrible sound playback.

Either way, I know that the people in charge of Fedora know what they’re doing and I look forward to seeing Fedora 9.

Tags: codecbuddy, fedora, fedora 8, fedora 9, fluendo, gstreamer, Linux, multimedia