"Not all major software versions carry the same weight. Consider the last two releases of the Fedora distribution. Fedora 7 offered little that was obvious to desktop users, despite some behind-the-scenes improvements and the opening of the release process to public scrutiny. By contrast, if Test 3 of Fedora 8 is any indication, the upcoming release, scheduled for next month, returns to the distribution's tradition of introducing a variety of innovations. Some of these innovations, like the new firewall tool, are minor, if still welcome. Others, like the IcedTea version of Java and Codec Buddy, are flawed, but may eventually find their way into other distributions."
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2005-07-06
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While this review is overall positive, it is short and missed out quite a lot of changes in the upcoming release of Fedora 8.
Some of them like Network Manager 0.7 or Pulse audio by default where the upstream developers are also the Fedora maintainers are unique to this release though very likely to be adopted by other distributions. More information is available at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/ReleaseSummary
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2005-11-12
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I downloaded the Rawhide Live CD of the latest test release and I was really impressed by version 8. I was skeptical about the CodecBuddy application so I tried to play a mp3 file and CodecBuddy GUI appeared and asked me if I wanted to download a free decoder or buy one. I selected the free codec and the install screen came up and then the mp3 played. The pulse audio was very sweet and I was playing around with adjusting the sounds from several applications and blending the output together. I had CompizFusion running also and Gnome was pimped out. Version 8 will definitely turn some heads. I was reading a developers forum the other day and some of the developers were commenting how version 8 appeared more stable than 7. The user friendliness of 8 is superior to 7. The Live CD is a joy to use and worked great. I added several applications using my available RAM and they all worked perfectly. I switched Network Manager from wired to wireless and it picked up the change without any editing of configs. Smooth. Grab the latest Rawhide torrent and try the Live CD. http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
Edited 2007-10-23 23:30
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>Nope. It points to Fluendo legal codecs.
Just to make it clear: So it is not free (as in freedom) it is just gratis.
I dislike the whole Codec Buddy, at least as it is implemented now. Two reasons:
1. It is some kind of advertising for a company which develops and sells non-free software. I don't like advertising in operating systems especially not in community based operating systems.
2. I have followed Fedoras progress to become a complete free operating system (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FreeSoftwareAnalysis). It is sad to see that now that they were almost there they have taken a step backward. With Codec Buddy they lead their users to non-free software. At the end it is no difference if Fedora includes this non-free software in their repository or if they include the third party repository (here Fluendo) so tightly in their system that for most users the non-free software just comes from/with Fedora.
Fedora distributes non-free software, even if the software is not hosted on their servers, and makes advertising for a company. Really sad, I had high hopes of Fedora.
Edited 2007-10-24 09:26
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One of the options being evaluated from the legal perspective is to link to other third party repositories which might be a option for users on regions that don't enforce software patents.
While Fedora itself doesn't distribute those or the Fluendo codecs and never will, this now works similar to Firefox flash plugin which is easily installed but not distributed by Fedora. Of course, Fedora now packages gnash and swfdec will likely follow (since it's recent switch to gstreamer) and these are recommended about non-free programs and should in the future get installed by default once they become a bit more stable and mature.
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Given the lack of information (hardware?) and the lack of a bug report [!] link, this report means little (if any).
... If he wants his card to be detected by F8-release, he should have taken the time to post a bug report in bugzilla.redhat.com instead of just bitching about it.
- Gilboa
Edited 2007-10-24 10:03
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Replying to myself. As a test I installed Ubuntu 7.10.
The experimental intel video driver which was installed by default (like on FC8test3) did not work. However changing to i810 fixed everything (on FC8test3 this did not work either).
I'm happier now (Ubuntu is beautiful BTW).
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That explains more or less how to switch Execshield on or off. But doesn't say wether the build in hardware memory protection of some capable CPU's is used or not.
Furthermore i have got the insight that the paxctl tool is a bit more fine grained when you want to change flags on a single binairy/librairy instead of making the whole stack executable, aka "kernel.exec-shield = 0" in "/etc/sysctl.conf".