Fedora 12: Desktop and Kernel
Desktop
The full installation DVD installs the GNOME 2.28.1 desktop by default – a variant of the GNOME 2.28 desktop released last September that contains various bug fixes. Fedora's standard instant messaging client is no longer Pidgin. The distribution now uses Empathy, which GNOME has used since version 2.26. Like the current version of Pidgin, which is still included in Fedora, Empathy offers audio and video chat functionality.
Fedora now includes Gnote instead of Tomboy.
Instead of the Mono-based version of the Tomboy note taking software, Fedora now installs the software's Gnote C++ port – this removes the heavily discussed and criticised Mono software stack from the desktop spin. However, the developer has since ceased work on Gnote and, so far, no-one has taken over development of the project.
In an interview, Red Hat employee Matthias Clasen explains numerous further, mostly GNOME-related advancements in the desktop area – including several changes to the appearance of the tooltips, the icons and the file dialogue, which he demonstrates in a blog post. Since not all Fedora users welcomed the bigger margins between panel applets and icons and the removed icons in some of the menus, the release notes demonstrate how to reinstate the old behaviour.
The developers have reworked the audio mixer for GNOME, introduced with Fedora 11, to make the program, which has received considerable criticism, more attractive. Fedora/Red Hat has also introduced many new features into PulseAudio, which is used by the mixer software and has also been heavily criticised. Its new features include UPnP MediaServer support, event sounds with surround audio, Bluetooth hardware optimisation measures and simplified audio output routing to other systems.
Version 4.3.2 of KDE is included – however, this isn't really a new feature as Fedora 11, which was originally shipped with KDE 4.2, received the more recent version of KDE as a regular update several weeks ago. Instead of the Xine back end, Phonon now uses the Gstreamer back end by default.
The Fedora developers have also integrated the Moblin desktop into the package repositories. This was master-minded by Peter Robinson, who is also working on a Moblin remix. Due to the integration of version 1.1 of libtheora, Constantine also supports the Thusnelda open source video codec. It reportedly offers considerable quality and speed improvements compared to version 1.0 and is designed to provide contemporary encoding efficiency for Ogg Theora.
Spins, remixes etc.
The term spin refers to an official distribution based on Fedora packages which has been rubber-stamped by the project, has been customised for a specific purpose, and can be started from CD, DVD or USB Flash drive. Spins not only allow users to test and install Fedora, but can also be used just like a hard disk copy or Knoppix.
The desktop spin of Fedora, for instance, is equipped with a software selection optimised for mainstream PC users. It offers the GNOME desktop, but doesn't contain OpenOffice due to space constraints; the KDE, LXDE and Xfce spins of Fedora are similar spins, but with the LXDE or Xfce desktop. The spins mentioned above are all available as CD ISO images; spins like "Games" or "Education", on the other hand, are designed for larger capacity DVDs. From Fedora 12, spins can also be transferred to USB Flash drives with programs like "dd". However, transfers are best done with the liveusb-creator program, which is available for Linux and Windows and was already included in earlier versions of Fedora. If required, the program can arrange for a dedicated memory area to be created when starting the spin. This memory area can then be used for the data written during operation – which may include both documents and manually installed or updated software.
As the LiveCD-tools are by no means restricted to creating CDs, they can also be used for creating custom Fedora-based distributions via the appropriate kickstart files and a dedicated selection of packages. However, such distribution images are no longer allowed to use the Fedora trademarks when publicly distributed. The project's naming regulations also prohibit users from calling their custom Fedora-based distributions "spins" when sharing them. The term Fedora remix can be used for indicating the distribution's origin instead. This avoids any confusion between custom distributions and the Fedora project's official distribution images.
The desktop spins can be found right at the top of the Fedora download page. However, the project also offers CD and DVD ISO images complete with a traditional installer that allows flexibility when selecting programs and file systems – which isn't available with a spin. The traditional installation medium also allows updating an earlier Fedora version to its successor; updating via PreUpgrade is probably more convenient, comprehensive and faster in most situations, although on some Fedora installations it fails if the boot partition is too small. The automatic installation with kickstart can only be run from the traditional installation medium. Lean versions of this medium are available for network installations.
All of these Fedora 12 variants use the same package repository for adding further software. This allows the packages of the KDE spin to be added to the GNOME spin, and vice versa. The variants also obtain their updates from the same repositories. As usual, the Fedora project plans to release updates about a month after the release of the second successor – since a new version of Fedora is released about every 6 months and every distribution is maintained for about 13 months.
Foundations
The kernel of Fedora 12 is based on Linux version 2.6.31.5. The Fedora developers modified it with about 100 patches and patch collections – the largest of which contains the changes to the DRM subsystem that were introduced in Linux 2.6.32 to add KMS and 3D support for recent Radeon GPUs. Some of the patches for the Btrfs file system – however, the installation program will only offer the experimental file system if the "icantbelieveitsnotbtr" parameter is submitted during start-up.
NetworkManager now has better support for setting up internet connections via mobile devices.
Furthermore, the Fedora hackers have incorporated Lirc and Nouveau – the latter generated abrasive critcism at the recent Kernel Summit. Other mainstream distributions, however, typically make more extensive changes to their kernels and integrate a lot of kernel code that doesn't live up to the quality standards of the kernel hackers around Linus Torvalds. This includes components like the support of Xen Dom0, which was removed from Fedora quite a while ago, or the drivers from the Linux staging branch. Fedora all but ignores the latter – including various Wi-Fi drivers for chip-sets by Ralink, Realtek and VIA that are often used in netbooks. Users can manually add some of these drivers via package repositories like RPM Fusion. However, the drivers are known to have problems with the NetworkManager because they don't, or only partially, use the Linux kernel's current Wi-Fi stack – which is one of the reasons why the Fedora developers haven't included them in their distribution.
Fedora no longer generates the kernel's initial ramdisk (Initrd) with mkinitrd, using the modular and cross-distribution Dracut instead. A modern version of Mdamd and the corresponding support in the installer is designed to allow Fedora 12 to be installed on level 5 Host/Fake RAIDs, provided the RAIDs are managed by a modern Intel motherboard chip-set.
Fedora is very current in many areas and doesn't shirk from using emerging technologies – in terms of the boot loader, however, the project left the first major field test of GRUB 2 to the new versions of openSUSE and Ubuntu, and continues to use the old Legacy version of GRUB in its standard installation. This version, however, now supports Ext4 which Fedora has used by default since version 11. As a consequence, there is no longer a need for a separate boot partition if the root partition uses Ext4.
Next: Delta-RPMs and Virtualisation
![Kernel Log: Coming in 3.10 (Part 3) [--] Infrastructure](/imgs/43/1/0/4/2/6/7/2/comingin310_4_kicker-4977194bfb0de0d7.png)
![Kernel Log: Coming in 3.10 (Part 3) [--] Infrastructure](/imgs/43/1/0/4/2/3/2/3/comingin310_3_kicker-151cd7b9e9660f05.png)
