Not quite a month since release.  I wanted to give myself a few weeks to play with it before reviewing it so I could try it out on multiple machines with everyday usage.

To generally sum up Fedora 11 – Wow!  This has been one of the most stable releases of Fedora yet, and it comes with plenty of new features worth upgrading/migrating.

I have three different physical machines (two laptops, one desktop) and one VirtualBox image running Fedora 11.  Between these four, I have used 32 and 64-bit versions on ATi, nVidia, and Intel graphics cards.

Installation

Two of my machines were upgraded from Fedora 10 using preupgrade.  Both of these had several packages in RPMFusion and are also using adobe’s repository.  Preupgrade worked and worked well.  Preupgrade now leaves the 3rd part repos enabled so all of my RPMFusion packages were upgraded during this process.  The only snags I ran into were that my 100MB /boot was not big enough to hold stage2, so this was downloaded by a random mirror on reboot, which is not really a big deal.  The preupgrade process only brings packages up to Fedora 11 release, not the updates, so I had several Fedora 10 lingering packages.  After doing a system update, all was well.  The other limitation was that preupgrade does not migrate to ext4, which is one of the new features of Fedora 11.

The anaconda installer works great.  Fedora 11 can now use btrfs and ext4, which both offer significant performance improvements.  The partitioner has had it’s language simplified as well.  As in the past, the partitioner is capable of handling a very basic setup to very complex with adding software RAIDs and LVM and can also resize your other partitions for you to make space.

Sound

This has been the biggest issue with Fedora in past releases, and I have had all sorts of fun things happen with my Audigy 2 ZS card getting things to work well.  With Fedora 11, I finally see pulseaudio working flawlessly on all of my audio cards, with one exception which I’ll explain later.

Video

More big improvements by way of more video card support.  One of my laptops has a Radeon 7500, and Fedora 11 now supports kernel modesetting and this old-school card runs compiz-fusion like a dream now.  Part of my upgrade process was removing hacks I did used to get stuff to work in Fedora 10 with this card.  The nVidia desktop that uses nVidia’s proprietary driver upgraded without a hitch and hasn’t caused any problems in my system so far.

My new laptop with an ATI RadeonHD 4650 is another story.  While in Fedora 10, X would not start with this card, X now starts with the Vesa driver, but has severe problems, such as the screen going to garbage when you switch to vtty and back and not being able to pick a decent resolution.  ATI has yet to release a driver compatible with the kernel that ships in Fedora 11, but that will likely change in about a month.  The open source ati drivers do not currently support the Radeon HD 3xxx or 4xxx series cards yet, but that is also expected to change very soon.  For now, I have downgraded this laptop to Fedora 10 until ATI or the open source community picks up support for my video card.

Desktop Experience and Performance

Plymouth (shiny boot up) is working on most video cards out of box now.  The 20 second startup really does seem accurate, even on my slower, old laptop.  Plymouth also shows at shutdown now.  Another cool new feature of Fedora 11 is the ability to log in with a fingerprint reader.  however, due to an existing bug at release day my fingerprint reader was not recognized – appears to affect HPs and ThinkPads.  The bug report suggests a fix for this is coming to Fedora 11 soon.  I have KDE and Gnome both installed, but mostly use Gnome.  KDE looks very sexy and very well done.  The Gnome desktop seems to be very stable and quick.  They have also done an amazing job on artwork this time.  PackageKit continues to mature and become more useful as a user-friendly GUI package manager.

Gaming

Unfortunately gaming through wine and Crossover games has problems.  Pulseaudio now works great in Fedora but my Audigy in World of Warcraft is a nasty mess.  The left and right channels are so out of sync it just sounds like chainsaw ripping into a giant ice cream cone.  World of Warcraft also fails to start with DirectX and in OpenGL mode Ctrl keys no longer work.  Other wine apps also seem to be crashing quite a bit more often in Fedora 11 and the same.

Summary

Fedora 11 has been a pretty solid release from release day.  With exception to the few cases mentioned above, Fedora 11 is a pretty fun and exciting user experience.  Onward to Fedora 12!

Fedora 11 was released this Tuesday, and I plan to do a review on that once I’ve spent a little more time on it, but so far I’m impressed with it.  After getting my desktop upgraded, I was eager to see how WoW would do on the new Xorg and new sound fixes.

Unfortunately, not well.  Crossover Games bombed.  While sound is working the best it has on my desktop everywhere else, it is nothing but a terrible fuzz in Crossover Games.  About 75% of the time WoW didn’t fully launch.  Sometimes it would just disappear, other times it would produce a nasty stack trace and then the process would need to be killed.  The few times I did get WoW to load up it was slow and doggy, and the sound was just horrendous.  I tried to WoW repair, but to no avail.

The good news is – wine works great.  I pointed wine to my Crossover Games bottle and launched Wow.exe from there and it fired right up.  Sound works, too.  I haven’t put it through any raids yet to give a full out performance review, but at least it’s playable.

I did try to send my stack trace to Codeweavers, but since I failed to enter my email address on the lame duck challenge, I cannot enter a support ticket and am “out of luck” in terms of support.  I hope Codeweavers can get their fixes in for Fedora 11.  In the meantime, it’s back to wine.

If you haven’t seen the demo for Google Wave yet, I highly recommend spending the hour and twenty minutes to watch it. Google has made an open source collaboration tool that will let you do more in a common browser than imaginable. From one webpage you can handle all of your email, collaboratively edit documents at the same time, share media, instantly update your blog, manage your twitter feeds, and handle bug tracking, all with really wild tools.

Because it is all open source, Google showed how communication would work even when communicating with a competitor that is also using this new protocol. It is based on HTML5 and most of the code has been written with Google’s Webtool Kit.

I also enjoyed the pitch to open source at the end, and their rationale for why they aren’t keeping it prioprietary even though they would have some very good reasons to (not to mention they are stepping on the toes of enterprise and collaborative tools vendors).

When this comes out, we can finally mop the floor with Exchange and Sharepoint for good:

I was able to sees preview showing of this film.  Having not really been excited about the DaVinci Code (the prequel to Angels and Demons), I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Angels and Demons is an all-around better movie than the DaVinci Code was.  It’s more exciting, has a more engaging plot, and plenty of good action scenes.

You absolutely do not need to see the first movie or have read either book to appreciate this movie.  The biggest cultural contrast is that this movie/book to the first is that Angels and Demons generated almost no controversy.  This may be in part because there is no reference to Jesus being married and having a lineage in this story.  While it still plays off a historically inaccurate concept of the Illuminati (they didn’t even exist in the 17th Century), the new film shows much more respect for the Catholic church.  This time Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) joins up with the Catholic church working to stop an imminent terrorist threat at the Vatican after four cardinals likely to replace a recently deceased pope have been kidnapped.

It does show some pattern with the DaVinci Code as each scene provides some cryptic symbolic code that Langdon must figure out in time leading into the next schene.  The movie has plenty of plot twists and turns to keep you wondering who the good guys are.  The action scenes are not over the top with blood and gore, and are generally tastefully done.

In conclusion, simply an entertaining movie.  Whereas the Davinci Code seemed long and dull at times, this one was engaging all the way through.  Go see it.

UPDATE:

This does not work for Fedora 11.  For Fedora 11 x86_64, I have compiled clamz, which is free and open source.  Get the RPM here and the source here.
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There are many things to love about amazon’s music store: mainstream and lesser well-known artists.  DRM-free.  Super-common mp3 format.  Some of the cheapest prices on the market.  Hundreds of no-cost songs.

But although Amazon.com supports Linux and has RPMs for Fedora, they don’t actually work on Fedora 9 or 10 .  But they do with a few steps.  Here’s how (for i386 and x86_64):

1. Log in as root: su.
2. yum install boost.i386
3. cd /lib
4. ln -s libssl.so.0.9.8g libssl.so.6
5. ln -s libcrypto.so.0.9.8g libcrypto.so.6
6. Download the rpm from http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/help/amd.html
7. cd <the location of where you just saved that RPM>
8. rpm -ivh –nodeps amazonmp3.rpm

As a note of caution, I would frown on ever using –nodeps in any sort of regular practice, and rpm -qV will show library dep problems (which we actually solved).

Enjoy your new DRM-free tunes!

(Special thanks to FedoraForum.)

Whether or not it’s anyone’s business or that the general American cares about the ongoing spat between the Johnston’s and the Palin’s, there is one important thing to see in this.

Sarah Palin ran on the platform of family values.  When news came out that her daughter was pregnant, she was championed for supporting her daughter and Levi in jointly raising that kid.  That was until Bristol and Levi broke up.

Sarah Palin no longer seems to think having both parents involved in a child’s life is ideal, by keeping Levi from being able to see his son outside of the Palin residence.  The Johnston family may need a lawyer – let’s see: high powered Republican governor vs small time Alaskan family in court.

It’s enormously sad that someone who claims to be a leader in valuing families would take such a stance, and instead of acknowledging what’s going on, continues to release statements painting the Johnstons as Jerry Springer-esque, claiming they are just going on TV for money (they aren’t getting paid for any interviews).

It seems that Sarah is willing to champion family values for a vote, but not in her personal life.

Looks like we dodged a bullet in 2008.

This haunts me:

“No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and wealth.” (Luke 16:13)

“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” (Matthew 13:44)

Response to Adam’s blog.

I ate lunch with my pastor yesterday.  We were talking about something similar to this site.  I said, “Some people tend to see Christianity as a social club that they wouldn’t want to be a part of.”

My pastor quickly replied: “I can relate to that.”

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Unfortunately this site seems to be the reaction of those who have seen vocal Christians leave lifestyles other than what they advocated.  It’s a hard thing to think about:  I’ve known several strong, vocal Christians who have ended up living a blatantly carnal lifestyle who at one point, or worse, at the same point, condemned that behavior in others.

One of the basic tenants of Christianity is that humans are depraved beings.  We admit that we, of ourselves, are not capable of God’s standard.  The self-righteous people who label themselves as Christians likely do not understand their own position, nor the humility that comes from accepting grace.

The truth is it’s easy to point out homosexuals and murderers, but harder to do it when you realize you own the same defect, and you need the exact same grace.

Christianity is about Jesus.  The social club clique of some churchs has moved the focus of our faith away from Jesus, and made an easy game of saying: look at this person – look what he says and then does – now generalize this to Christianity.

My favorite quote from Jay Kessler is “If you follow anyone long enough they will disappoint you.  But the more you follow Jesus, the more marvelous he gets.”

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Revelation 12:10-12 (NIV)

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Christ.

For the accuser of our brothers, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down.

They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.

Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.”

In many ways Firefox was a gateway drug for me into open source software.  The add-ons, tabbed browsing, and clean, fast interface quickly won me over from my long tenure as an IE user.  Another benefit of it being open source is that the mozilla engine has served as a basis for other projects, including Songbird, a media player, and Flock, a browser for Web 2.0 fans.

I have been able to get Songbird and Flock both working in Fedora 10, but neither are currently in Fedora or RPMFusion’s repos yet.  Flock-2.0 (not 2.0.1 or later) currently works in CentOS 5.3.

Songbird

I was a fan of KDE’s amarok up to version 1.5.  Since the new interface with amarok 2.0 didn’t rub me the right way, I haven’t been playing much music on my PC anymore.  I still listen to music on my Blackberry and my last.fm library, but it just isn’t the same.  Then came songbird.

This media player his it’s sights directly on being the open source answer to iTunes, yet offers so much more.  Songbird is another app just shouting that open source can drive innovation.  Like Firefox, it offers easy to install add-ons to enhance the music experience.  For instance there is an add-on that allows you to tap the rhythm of the song stuck in your head and it will find the song for you.  Other add-ons can fetch lyrics for a song in your library.

It also can be integrated with music stores.  When a song is played, Songbird automagically grabs album and artist info.  Add-ons can also generate artist recommendations based on what you’re listening to.  You can also play your last.fm and shoutcast stations from the media player.

Best of all, it makes music on the PC fun again for open source fans.

Flock

I’m half afraid to do a review on this one.  It has a lot of features, and many of which I haven’t used yet.  Please do not accept this as comprehensive.  It just does so much stuff at once.

Anyone who has fallen into the Web 2.0 trap is well aware that it can be hard to keep track of facebook, wordpress, myspace, twitter, and let’s not forget all our daily RSS feeds, all while trying to find the pictures from your aunt’s photobucket album about her great family vacation.  You can either have 20 firefox tabs open at once – or, there’s flock.

No longer is uploading a picture on flickr to facebook a difficult chore.  When you open flock, flock can log you into all your accounts – facebook, email, myspace, blogspot, etc.  There is a tab for social networking sites that keeps updated so when your ex-girlfriend changes her status from Single you’ll know right away.  When you visit a page that has media or feeds available, you can click a button at the top that lights up to see all videos and pictures, or subscribe to the feeds available.  The feeds are all aggregated in the browser and you can see all of them at once.

The browser also has a blog editor that can post to multiple blogs (how I’m writing this now).

This is admittedly for a targetted audience.  All the extra stuff going on does slow down the browser and it does use a lot of resources.  If you’re not into Web 2.0 stuff that much, you probably will end up sticking with something lighter (like regular firefox).  For those who have already been sucked into Web 2.0’s vicous grasp, this browser aims to be your best friend.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

If you are a fan of the government tapping your phone calls without a warrant and Google potentially reading your gmail, you’ll love Microsoft Internet Explorer 8!

Part of Microsoft’s new approach to the web is targeted ads (and in fairness, Google and Facebook have also played with this).  The idea is that instead of displaying random ads, it will query what sites you have been on and display ads based on what pages you’ve been visiting.  This means that your browser willingly gives up this information.

Due to market demand for privacy, Microsoft is giving the illusion of privacy, but really just playing a dirty game.  It offers InPrivate features that gives the user the option to block cookies and disallow ads from seeing where you’ve browsed.  Sounds good.

The catch?  The settings to change this are cumbersome and annoying, and these are turned off by default, meaning a large demographic of Windows users won’t be aware of that Microsoft is seeing what they are doing, but even those who are aware may lack the skills to turn it off.

If that seems like nit-picking, it gets better:  InPrivate Filtering must be enabled for each new browsing session!  Microsoft can then say “we have a feature” but in reality their plan is to annoy the end user in consenting to giving up their browsing information.

Let’s compare the private browsing settings for Firefox’s upcoming release (you can see this now in Minefield):

A simple check and it’s done.  Was that so hard?