alex diavatis | January 22, 2013

Looking @ Fedora 19, 18 seems already old :)

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

fedoraFedora 18 just released this month, but for the people that have tried Rawhide (aka Fedora 19) 18 has already started to showing its age.

The features for the next Fedora haven’t been yet decided but some cool features have already arrived in the development version, towards to the Alpha, which is expected to come somewhere in the end of February. 

Fedora @ Full Speed

A quick look at specifications in Fedora 19 reveal us, Linux 3.8, X-Server 1.14 (1.13.99) and Systemd 197. All these are major updates and brings massive improvements in performance, better devices support, improved ACPI power management, and together with GNOME 3.8 better support in multi-monitor screens.

nvidia-318

The other cool part is that you can easily install the latest nVidia drivers (313.18), that work great with X Server and Linux. Other proprietary software like Video/Audio Codecs, Google Chrome and Adobe Flash is also present and one click to install. Of course you should add an extra Repo (RPM Fusion) for getting proprietary software.  Rawhide’s current Linux (3.8.0-0.rc4) runs with no-debug enabled, and everything is quite fast.

Sharing and Receiving

You remember Joey Tribbiani speech about Giving and Receiving? Fedora and GNOME have made some progress on that. First we will find the OwnCloud support.

owncloud

For now, you can connect to OwnCloud Services, but there isn’t yet a client to make something useful, but it will be here till 3.8 arrives. There is this OwnCube Service that you can use with your ownCloud that gives very good prices. Actually there is a plethora of such services, that if you check on them you will find much much better plans from Dropbox or Ubuntu One. Of course you can also setup your very own, OwnCloud :)

Fedora and Gnome also will now include a Sharing Panel in G-Control-Center.

sharing

Useful but not exciting. You can share folders over network and open/close your SSH Server. A DLNA (UPnP) protocol wouldn’t be bad here.

Launching Files from G-Shell

In Fedora 19 with GNOME 3.8 you will really love the new Shell. If they further improve the way that results are displayed, I doubt that in the short future (2months) we will use G-Files for discovering and open our files.

shell-files

Hit on Super, Type, get the results, navigate with arrows and Enter! It is amazing fast way to launch files, with or without the mouse. However in the current form with only 3 results to be displayed, that won’t work. There is a huge space for improvements here, but the idea is right.

Sounds in Notifications

There are massive changes in Notifications in GNOME 3.8. I really like the latest ones that arrived in Shell just 2-3 days ago. Between other options, you can add enable sounds for various events.

notifications-sounds

If you are far from your PC/Tablet/whatever  you won’t miss a notification that you don’t want to miss. That reminds me the “so familiar” sound of MSN Messenger.  By the way MS is shutting down Messenger and replaces it with Skype.

There are hundreds of cool changes in Fedora 19 but to be honest I don’t really think that it matters a lot what distro will you pick. Today all distros feel good and pretty much each of them offers the same, with slightly changes in packages, some different configurations and a different update manager.

So next time you are wondering what distro to pick, just choose the one with the logo you like ;)

This article was posted in Distros and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments with the RSS feed for this post.Post a Comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
                 
  • http://twitter.com/dimitrakhs9 Dimitris Dafalias

    Everything’s cool with Fedora 18,but the fact that i can’t downlooad anything from browsers(MOzilla&Chrome).Is that because of the fact that i can’t verify it(i’ve tried but…zip)?And what is this anyway?Who thought this?

    • alex285

      What do you mean?

      • http://twitter.com/dimitrakhs9 Dimitris Dafalias

        Anything i have to install,like yum,rpm directly from web…i just can’t…it says “It can’t be verified”…

        • alex285

          I am not sure what you exactly mean, but you can try this
          sudo gedit /etc/yum.repos.d/{your repo}
          and set
          gpgcheck=0
          You probably missing some key, but I don’t think verification is important anyway for the well known repos.

          • http://twitter.com/dimitrakhs9 Dimitris Dafalias

            Thank you!You are the best!

          • Dimitris Dafalias

            guess what…I decide to reinstall Fedora and this time…no bug!Ha ha!Thank you anyways guys!

          • alex285

            I also did have that bug ;)

        • Carlos Soriano Sánchez
          • http://twitter.com/dimitrakhs9 Dimitris Dafalias

            Thank you so much both!+Carlos Soriano Sanchez +alex285…I was pissed off and installed Ubuntu!Ho ho!But i will try it some day later!

  • jon_downfromthetrees

    My problem with search as a way to find files is that I can remember the names of recent files, but not from, say, 5 weeks ago. Same for applications. I may remember I have an app that does XYZ, but, because I haven’t used it in a year or so, I haven’t the slightest idea what it is called. In both cases, I just want to scan a directory listing until I recognize what I’m looking for. Apps typically have Recent Files entries and Bash has its history.

    I run into this on my iPad, which I wish really had just a simple file manager.

    Also, search needs to default to indexing everything (I’m assuming it will index, not run real-time searches) rather than go with the constrained subset Documents and Tracker deal with. Neither are of use to me because I create few of the filetypes they care about. I only figured out a few weeks ago that Documents wasn’t broken when it kept showing an empty display although the Documents folder contained files.

    • JJ

      With 3.8, you don’t have to type the exact application name to get the applications. The keywords are added to the desktop files. So, you can type paint and get to gimp etc…

      But for files, if you don’t know the names, you are on your own; or could get to the specific folder from shell and browse (you should atleast know your folders).

      I love gnome….We are close to becoming the worlds best and (first ever) perfect OS!!!!

  • Philip Witte

    wait… Fedora 19 will have proprietary software in it’s repos? If true, that’s awesome. The reason I initially moved away from Fedora was due to the difficulties of installing Catalyst… does this mean software like Steam might make an appearance? :)

    • alex285

      Hey Philip, I used Extra Repo :)

      • alex285

        My bad, is RPM Fusion!

      • Philip Witte

        Ah, I see. Too bad.

        Today, I wouldn’t have a problem setting up Fedora + Catalyst (hell, I’m using Arch), but back in the day I was just switching from Windows and didn’t know much about Linux ecosystems, so finding where to get the “good drivers” for my specific Fedora release wasn’t very obvious (or even that there where “good drivers” to get). Ubuntu’s “Additional Drivers” works very well.

        I’m all for Open Source, but using what works is ultimately the most productive. I’m not sure why Fedora has such a rigid view on proprietary software in their repos, it’s not like the hardware we’re running it on is open-source.

        anyways, just my thoughts.

        • Helder Pereira

          They claim they have to because of legal issues. As Red Hat is a US based company, a country where software patents are valid, any copyright infringement could lead to a lawsuit and put them out of business. Canonical doesn’t have that sort of problem as its offices are in London, UK (and I might be wrong but software patents are not valid in the EU) and even their fiscal hq is officially the Isle of Man, a known tax-haven, which is sort of still UK and also sort of not. Other Linux distros don’t have a corporate sponsor behind, are purely community based like Debian and Arch, and are not viable to sue.

          So while I don’t like the inconvenience, I understand it is necessary for Red Hat and Fedora survival from the patent trolls that roam this Earth.

          • Philip Witte

            Ahh, I see. Thanks for shedding light on that. I always thought it was due to Open-Source purity. Ohh… America and our patents… *sigh*

          • Craig

            “…where software patents are valid, any copyright infringement…”

            You seem to be very confused. Those are 2 completely different things. Patents have absolutely zero to do with copyright. The European Patent Convention has been edging closer and closer to the U.S. patent system. By this point it’s not at all accurate to say “software patents are not valid in the EU”. Also, not all European countries are part of the EPC, so talking about “Europe” in terms of patents doesn’t really mean anything.

            You also seem to conflate “proprietary” and “patented”. What patented software does Ubuntu package?

  • Ade Malsasa Akbar

    Please change the default icon theme of Gnome…

  • dumindu

    is there any way to upgrade to Fedora 19 from 18?
    And why are you using a Windows 8 wallpaper :D

    • alex285

      There isnt’t a fedora 19 yet. You can use Rawhide, which is what will become fedora 19
      $ sudo yum install fedora-release-rawhide

      Then go to /etc/yum.repos.d/ and disable all repos but rawhide
      then just update
      $ sudo yum update

      Just don’t do that in production machine!

      I just give Windows 8 Fish some freedom :)

    • Craig Wessel

      The windows 8 wallpaper is used by many who test Linux Distro Releases that are in “Alpha and Beta” Windows beta’s are known for having the Beta fish, that is why on Linux we use the Windows Beta Fish for testing our betas of either a desktop or a Distribution. It’s kind of a joke.

  • john

    Hi, I tried gnome 3.6 (fedora 18 and ubuntu 12.10) and it’s unusably slow compared to gnome 3.4, unity and kde. i just move windows and lags so bad. It only happens when i use nvidia driver, nouveau seems to work better. Is there any workaround?

  • Pingback: Links 26/1/2013: Half-Life for GNU/Linux, More News | Techrights

  • Duko Trolle

    Nice Windows 9 Bananos