“Getting FC2 to a state of desktop readiness is a task that requires a medium amount of skill and will probably take close to a full day for the first workstation (assuming that you have a high-speed Internet connection). Subsequent installs should go more quickly; indeed, I intend for my students to get most of it done during their first three-hour class.” Read the article here.The Fedora team has posted a schedule for their 3rd release. The plan includes SELinux (again), GNOME 2.8 (ignore the 2.6 typo), Evolution 2.0, improved printing, remote desktops via VNC, and Pango support in Mozilla. Planned release date is October 18th.
Fedora Core 2: Making it work; Fedora Core 3 Schedule Posted
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Are they planning to put in KDE 3.2 or KDE 3.3 in Fedora Core 3? I don’t see any mention of it on the Release Schedule.
They need to include the latest stable builds of Mono, XSP, GTK# and wx.NET. I’m stuck between using wx.NET and going to Java for a RSS/RDF/Atom news reader that I’m wanting to write since wxWidgets and Swing seem to both be far cleaner and easier than either GTK# or Windows Forms.
It’d be really nice for RedHat to dump some of their bloat and add Mono and some of the “alternative” toolkits like wx.NET to it by default. Right now I’m using OSX and it’d really make work easier if these things were installed by default.
I guess if it is indeed released before Aug 25th. Since KDE does not have time-based release schedules, it may be difficult for distros to plan ahead on including new versions.
Pango support in Mozilla!!!!!
thats great.
Mono will most likely not get in. Key Redhat employees – the one I’m thinking of is Havoc, but there are others – are still a little hesitant about the legal issues.
KDE 3.3 is planned to be included.
You can read more http://lwn.net/Articles/92465/“>here fedora-devel-list” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-July/date.htm… archives.
Hope that helps.
someone could tell me how to allow apps to cover the GNOME panel. the “panel-is-always-on-top” thing pisses me off enough that I use XFCE as my main desktop instead. Not that I’m knocking XFCE its just that many GNOME apps are designed to work with, well, GNOME!
Anyone able to tell me how to change that setting?
Anyone?
Anyone?
I was a redhat gimp back in 98 when it was fairly new and hard to install. Then I went over to mandrake… Tried Xandros… ended up using it as a fileserver for my mp3s.
And 2 months ago when my HD died I installed Fedora 2… its been pretty smooth sailing since. I like it and I want to see more. But honestly I’d like to see less apps on the initial install… let me go out and get the ones I need.
Honestly I had to do that anyway with all the apps it installed i really didn’t like most of them. I had to get my own mp3/movie player (Xine btw rocks), I had to install my own browser (Foxfire cause Konqueror blows), and even though I love all the eyecandy in KDE3.2 I’m thinking of turning it off cause its getting damn annoying with all those crazy buried options I have to tweak to get it presentable. Of course that pretty much removes the control-center. Guess it’ll be back to pico…er nano… for all my config altering.
Of course all my hardware works great, even got my wacom tablet correctly, so that’s always a plus.
😉
…that Fedora Core 3 also support dual-boot with Windows without SCREWING UP IN A MASSIVE WAY this time !
Now that I think about it, maybe we need a lean, precompiled distro (PRECOMPILED– for you gentoo zealots… i tried it, I’m just too damn impatient to wait 3 days to use my machine while it installs) that has KDE libraries installed so you can use the select few apps that you want … without installing all those crap applications that ride in on its curtails when its installed. like Konqueror… and the 10,000 notepad clones.
Same deal with gnome, I absolutely hate the gnome start bars… if only i could get the binary compatibility without loading all the bloat… or 2 weeks of me banging my linux distribution of choice into submission. I swear its like taming a lion everytime I install a new distro to get it to meet my minimalistic standards. More is just not better to me…
My ideal system would be a desktop with NO ICONS, a terminal permanently stuck to the desktop (but a nice one like eterm, nice fonts transparency…) , right click access to the menu (which will NEVER have more than 3 levels) and ONE CONTROL PANEL that actually… CONTROLS EVERYTHING on the system hardware wise.
Guess its a pipedream though.
Why not simply use xfce4?
About your other points, no, you don’t need 3 days to compile anything on a computer with more than a pII, no, kde doesn’t have 10,000 notepad clones and anyway, blah, blah, blah…
“My ideal system would be a desktop with NO ICONS, a terminal permanently stuck to the desktop (but a nice one like eterm, nice fonts transparency…) , right click access to the menu (which will NEVER have more than 3 levels) and ONE CONTROL PANEL that actually… CONTROLS EVERYTHING on the system hardware wise.”
Ever heard of FVWM? For the control pannel use Linuxconf?
Obviously, a schedule doesn’t say much about what’s in it.
Here at Red Hat we’re working on various things for Fedora Core 3:
– GCC 3.4 – those that have looked at rawhide will have noticed this
– GNOME 2.8
– KDE 3.3
– SELinux, yet again. This includes a new ‘targeted’ policy that
monitors specifc daemons with less intrusion than the strict
policy in use before.
https://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-selinux-list/2004-May/msg…
– IIIMF – continued evolution of the new input framework
– Indic language support
– Various desktop-related features, including, but not limited to:
– Pango support for Mozilla
– Remote desktops using VNC
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2004-June/msg000…
– Printing improvements
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-June/msg0037…
– Evolution 2.0
I like this quote “If you insist on working in the GNOME environment…” I thought it was kind of funny. Fedora’s GNOME works really well, I thought. After testing the linux waters with my old laptop, I have switched to Fedora full time on my desktop. Its good stuff so far. I don’t know if I’ll stick with it yet, but I don’t see why not. The only things I really want from Fedora 3 is maybe a better way of dealing with libaries at program installations. It take the rpm, and the graphical package installer a long time to figure out the needed libraries. Also the default install takes far too long to boot (which honestly is about as long a XP used to take on the same computer). A friend of mine came over and worked on my computer for a minute and got boot time down to about 15 – 20 seconds, thats a lot better then before.
I was hoping they would rip out KDE and XFCE (along with a shit lot of software, FC is 4 cds now, it’s insane), and put them in EXTRAS where they belong – having only one desktop to official support is much nicer – and having them in Fedora Extras means that people who want to use that software still get compatible packages, maintained by people who actually care about them.
I generally think supporting two different environments goes against the FC policy of striving to support only one app to do one job.
We would not hear the end of it if they removed KDE. Seriously, a lot of people would be up in arms. even if there are a thousand distros that come without KDE. I think they shold make a single Fedora default install cd though, which is just a pre-made image to be copied to the desktop with just the desktop. Then people could choose to download the rest of the packages they need.
But removing KDE, even if I don’t use it, owuld not be a good idea.
“For some reason, Adobe’s official Acrobat Reader binaries have never worked in any version of Fedora, at least not for me or my students.”
It doesn’t say what the problem is. I made 2 modifications to make it work. I added
export LANG=en_US
at the top of acroread which I have in /opt/acrobat/bin/acroread
And I added
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/acrobat/bin
to the .bash_profile
Because the acrobat browser plugin needs it.
Another way to switchdesktop is the command
swichdesk kde
Devil’s Pie, google for it
I agree with you. But the minute you talk about relagating KDE to the ‘works but unoffical status’ you get a TON of KDE fans coming out of the woodwork who make enough noise to raise the dead.
This happens despite the fact that there are many KDE only distros for them to use. If I were to make a distro, I’d not even bother putting KDE into an extras CD. I’d put in the KDE libs themselves, since maybe someone would want to run a KDE app for which there is no GNOME equivalent, but I’d focus on GNOME. Personally, I think it’s smarter for a distro to focus on integrating ONE desktop environment, and do it well.
precompiled binaries in gentoo:
emerge -k <packagename>
including things like…
kde-base/kdebase-3.2.3
gnome-base/gnome-2.6.1-rc1
and other very up to date softwares.
you can have a bleeding-edge system with gentoo without compiling a single line of source.
You said, that “making FC2 usable for the desktop take about 1 day”. The steps you described are done within 30 minuted, including the installation and compiling the mp3 plugin by hand. You decided to switch from Gnome to KDE, because the Gnome help browser cannot display man pages ?? did you ever try to use a terminal and to enter “man <whateveryouwant>” ? Have you ever tried to start KDE Apps within Gnome (hint: it works perfectly!!) I’d recommend to get a little more familiar with linux and it’s desktop environments before writing articles, that pulls leave the impression, that FC2 is hardly usable. I like it much more than Suse with it’s dominant Yast and I prefer Gnome to KDE, since it does not lack any features but is slim and kept very easy in usage.
You said, you don’t like the spatial browser. Did you ever try to get used to it ? I did and it convinced me. It’s not a familiar interface to a filesystem. but it’s great if you got used to it – but still the terminal is faster !
Honestly the way KDE fanboys treated UserLinux pissed me off, finally Bruce Perens and the other developers caved..
I mean do you see GNOME fanboys hassle KDE only distro, no we simply don’t use or support them.
People have every right to use KDE, but forcing developers to supporting it just to make a point about choice isn’t positive, and it doesn’t result in a better end product for either party.
Fedora Core should be GNOME-ONLY, but include QT and all of teh KDE/QT libs so that we can still use KDE/QT apps.
Personally though, I don’t even install KDE on FC…
The author of the “desktop readiness” article obviously has a huge chip on his shoulder about KDE. I function quite nicely without KDE and I truly do not care for it. Also, interestingly enough, at work they started everyone off with KDE rather than GNOME under Debian, gradually about 8-10 people switched from KDE to GNOME. That’s not to say that everybody is going to prefer it, but that some do and GNOME doesn’t somehow make your desktop “unready” to be used.
This has nothing to do with the above but one of the article comments killed me:
> I’m stuck between using wx.NET and going to Java for a
> RSS/RDF/Atom news reader that I’m wanting to write
God knows we’ve got a shortage of those. Why not try working on Liferea or any one of a half dozen that could use a better feature set rather than adding another one which will likely never progress beyond what we’ve already got.
Why is everyone so up in arms about being Gnome only? I use Fedora and KDE. I think the current way of doing things is fine. In order to cut down on the number of CDs, Fedora should start using 700 MB iso images instead of the 600+ MB ones they currently use. The 4th CD is practically useless.
People are just letting off steam caused by some KDE fans. I think people want Fedora to be GNOME only because there are very few (maybe none?) GNOME only distributions.
Having a distribution that is GNOME or KDE only give a number of benefits.
* System level tools can be made to integrate properly with the DE of choice. For gnome, good gnome-system-tools support can be made and a gnome based package manager and installation system can be made.
* Some applications need to be compiled with ‘GNOME’ or ‘KDE’ support. Distributions supporting both either compile a generic version or supply multiple binaries. For instance, all applications can be compiled to use the GNOME sound deamon.
* Distribution developers only have to focus on making one set of applications avaliable and working well. It takes a lot of time to setup a release of a DE, and even more time to keep all the application packages for a given DE up to date. With only one DE environment, the number of packages needing upkeep is drastically smaller. This means faster release cycles and possibly less bugs since all the developers focus only one one DE.
There are many KDE only distros such as knoppix, lindows, etc. It would be nice to get equally integrated GNOME distributions. RedHat used to focus mainly on GNOME, so I think a lot of people want that to continue. For instance, they want system configuration tools to be GTK, not QT. And mostly they want the developer attention focused on GNOME.
I just installed Fedora 2 on my laptop earlier today. I must say that I am blown away. Aside from my wireless card not working (it came built in on my Dell laptop), everything appears to work right out of the box. This is the first time I have EVER had this happen to me on a Linux distro. I even got my battery monitor to work properly! I think I finally found a distro that I can use along side with Windows, and I look forward to Fedora 3. I do have one compaint, and it appears someone already beat me to it: the download is way to big! I think they could cut out well over half of the programs and get the install down to like one or one and a half cds, so that I have one web browser, one graphichs program, one text editor, etc.
Sun Java Desktop is GNOME(plus some java apps) only, not KDE.
Is Fedora to include as many good GTK2 apps as it can and be Gnome only. I still think though it should have all the KDE lib’s for support of apps that need them like K3B, Koffice, etc..but over all KDE should be out of the picture for good. All config tools should be GTK2 as well. Also a trim down on the initial installation of apps. Install only one app ( native Gnome app’s having priority of course ) that is best suited for the job for each task that the user might want to do. That is unnless the user wants a different app or more then 1 of the same type of app then let them choose it in the install process. Slim it down like this when it comes to the install of Fedora and also I would like to see i586/i686 optimization. I don’t have a problem with downloading 4 cd’s as long as the default install does not require that I install everything on those 4 cd’s or more then one browser, email program, etc…
“For some reason, Adobe’s official Acrobat Reader binaries have never worked in any version of Fedora, at least not for me or my students.”
Well, I use the following script for acroread and solved all this problem
#— /usr/bin/acroread ——————–
#!/bin/bash
export IFS=”
export LANG=en_US
exec /usr/local/Acrobat5/bin/acroread $*
#——————————————-
the IFS line is there to allow commands such as
acroread File Name With Spaces.pdf
or
acroread “File Name With Spaces.pdf”
#— /usr/bin/acroread ——————–
#!/bin/bash
export IFS=\”
export LANG=en_US
exec /usr/local/Acrobat5/bin/acroread $*
#——————————————-
the double backslash in IFS line represents only one as, being only one, it gets ommited by the osnews post parser.
The main reason I use Fedora is because it is GNOME based,and I use GNOME because 99.9% of the applications I use are GTK based, I don’t touch KDE or any QT applications, If I wanted to use them I’ll prolly would be using SUSE or Mandrake, there’s room for both kind of distros, but for Fedora I’d like it to be GNOME only, of course, including kdelibs.
and that would be KDE, since I use Fedora and KDE. I’ve always used Fedora/Redhat, and I’ve always used KDE. 🙂
Seriously though, if RedHat employs enough people to support both desktops, while the hell not? The reason Mandrake exists, and why Suse became popular was that RedHat didn’t include KDE for a while.
I have googled for it. Several times with different fucking phrases. The question was asked nicely. If you don’t have an answer, ignore the fucking question like everybody else you turd!
Seeing how nice of a person you are and all:
http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/devilspie
Seriously though, if RedHat employs enough people to support both desktops, while the hell not?
Because unless they make configuration tools for both DE, neither one will be perfect. Redhat historically preferred gnome, and that is evidenced by the fact that the admin tools are GTK based. (If I am wrong someone please correct me, I haven’t actually used redhat for any significant period of time, although I have installed it briefly.) Similarly, other distro’s prefer KDE, and have KDE admin tools.
It should be noted that while Mandrake and SuSE are focused on KDE (just like RedHat is focused on GNOME), they do include GNOME on the installation CDs. Sure, their versions of GNOME don’t get much extra polish (just as KDE on Fedora/RedHat) doesn’t get much extra polish, but it’s still there.
There are several KDE-only distros, but most of them are pretty niche. And Sun’s JDS probably has as much market share as all of them combined. But JDS is pretty niche too — it’s targeted at a specific business market. It’s impossible to be a mainstream distro that includes only one desktop, there are just too many different tastes in the Linux community.
I realize it may just be the lack of optimization of the Rhythmbox application, but I find it very frustrating that my PIII laptop can’t play a Vorbis file without skipping when absolutely nothing but the default services are running, and I’m not even on the keyboard. I get a dropout every couple of minutes. Needless to say, Winamp and Windows XP never had this problem on the same computer. Hopefully it will work better (either the application or the OS) when FC3 comes out.
Dara
i didnt’ like fc2, nor mandrake, nor suse, after i tried a distro i always go back to xp, where my computer performs faster. open office takes time to load, while i can just click ms word and it opens instantaneously. hmm and i like windows because of one thing.. development, i find it much easier to develop under windows.. well thats just me.. just my 2 cents
This will be my last try of Fedora. If it can’t dual boot with Windows XP out of the box then thats it. It would also be very nice if it could use WinModems.
Xandros can do both and at this stage there seems little reason to change.
Regards,
Peter
>> It should be noted that while Mandrake and SuSE are focused on KDE (just like RedHat is focused on GNOME), they do include GNOME on the installation CDs.
SUSE Linux 9.1 Personal has only gnome libs.
I wish someone would create ltmodem rpm to work with FC2.
ltmodem for 2.4 kernel is easy to install, but the Net is full of people screaming for ltmodem support with 2.6 kernel (I am one of them).
I guess hardware support is important issue, but noone seems to care.
Sure. It’s only that OSNews.com is now GNOME-centric so they are copying everything from the planned features except KDE to their article.
I’m interested in this pango thing. Anyone want to explain this? Is it something that works in gnome or is it just it’s own thing (here’s hoping it’s not just it’s own thing).
FC2 has been nice but a bit too buggy in some ways. I hope they work out some of the little bugs first.
That said Evolution 2 with Groupwise support is great for me. It just looks like it rules. Now they need a windows version but I’m not sure this is possible since they are splitting it…
Remote Desktops. This is very exciting. Don’t know much about this but I sincerely hope it will have a client that works on more than just Linux.
gnome 2.8. I don’t remember all these developments but I belive there was some cool new system wide API’s and improvements to others. (I’m sure the KDE stuff is really cool too, I just haven’t really go into KDE)
Mono. I wish but it’s a pipe dream. Honestly mono is just cool. I wrote my own small app in no time with no prior C#, gtk# experience (wasn’t advanced at all but it’s still an easy entry). Here’s hoping they get the legal questions resolved better (Like we’re told they are working on).
Considering these kinds of developments Linux on the desktop is really getting there (it’s already something I prefer for a lot of stuff). Quite exciting. Let’s just hope things stabilize a bit more…
I’ve found that the smart link driver works fine with modems that require the ltmodem driver. You can get the driver from ftp://ftp.smlink.com/linux/unsupported/. Just follow the instructions and its fairly simple to set up.
Its not an RPM, but its easy enough to do.
I’d like to see firefox instead of full Mozilla Suite. Faster, smaller, written with GTK2 …