Monday, December 3, 2012

Key features in the new Fedora 18 beta


Fedora 18 was initially scheduled to be release on Nov 6, 2012 but after several postponements, it was delayed until Jan 8, 2013 (at least for now), and in the same way, the Beta release (schedule for Oct 2, 2012) has been finally release Nov 27 2012 (for more up-to-date information of the schedule check Fedora 18 Schedule Wiki.

As we already saw in the first alpha release, the new Anaconda installer is one of the key features in Fedora's next release, is one of the most modern and user friendly installer you will find in any distro, and with this new release we are finally seeing a great improvement over the last one.



One really big issue, that fedora could not resolve yet is the software center, to install Software you need the console, there's no way you can use GNOME Software without driving your self crazy, even this is nothing new for the experience users, for new users it is just a deal breaker. But as always, there's light at the end of the road, Dnf (next generation Yum) which is amazingly fast and will (not for sure, but likely) replace Yum in Fedora 19 can be use in Fedora 18, so we can give it a try and hopefully we will also get and a better GNOME Software App in GNOME 3.8.

Fedora 18 also includes a number of updated applications, including Samba 4; Gnome desktop version 3.6; Perl 5.16; Python 3.3; Rails 3.2; Linux kernel 3.6.7-5; GCC: 4.7.2; X 1.13; and the most recent release of OpenStack, called Folsom, but does not address the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). While both the Linux Foundation and Fedora itself are working on ways to offer trusted UEFI keys for Linux, none of this work has been added to Fedora 18 yet.


Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Fedora 18 alpha (late) review

Even we are getting closer to Fedora 18 Beta release, it's no to late to review all the good thing Fedora 18 alpha release has left us. Anaconda installer which has got a major overhaul in this release, terminals can now use 256 colors instead of the old 8 colors, the renew version of Gnome (3.6), and we also have some changes behind the scene, such as firewalld that is now the default firewall software, replacing iptables, a preview of next generation Yum packet manager with DNF and much more...


The new Anaconda interface has been simplified and acts no more as a wizard were you were asked for all the parameters one after the other; instead, the installer presents a few default settings that can be changed and only asks users to configure the parameters that they must decide on, such as installation location, password, network, time and location.

Even we oldies may find this new interface kind of weird, I think it will be a good thing for new people to be able to configure a complete install with a simpler interface, of course this is just the first step of this new interface, we will have to wait to see all the power behind it.



Monday, October 22, 2012


Hola, Soy José Todea y soy un joven entusiasta del mundo open source, para mí, Linux comenzó como un hobby y aún lo sigue siendo, aunque desde hace un par de años también se ha convertido en mi trabajo, realizando administracion de servidores linux/UNIX, y si bien durante mucho tiempo mantuve dual boot entre Windows y Linux, finalmente llegué al punto en el que rara vez utilizaba Windows, y fue con Fedora que logré esto.
Personalmente, me gustaría dar las gracias a las innumerables personas de todo el mundo que han utilizado gran parte de su tiempo y recursos para crear y mejorar esta distribución y espero poder aportar mi granito de arena para continuar avanzando con su desarollo.
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Hi, I'm Jose Todea and I am a young enthusiastic of the open source world, for me, Linux began as a hobby and still is, although for a couple of years it also has become my job, working as a Linux/UNIX SysAdmin, even though I kept dual boot between Windows and Linux for a long time, I finally reached the point where Windows was rarely used, and was with Fedora I accomplished that.
Personally, I would like to thank the countless people worldwide who have used much of their time and resources to create and improve this distribution and hope to contribute my part to continue improving its development.