Fedora In the News
In this section, we cover news from the trade press and elsewhere that is re-posted to the Fedora Marketing list[1].
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing
Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco
Fedora 16 to have Grub2, GNOME 3.2 and KDE 4.7 (The H Online)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1] an article on some upcoming features in Fedora 16 from The H Online:
"The feature list contains 40 items, including GNOME 3.2 and KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.7. The developers are planning to switch to using Grub2 for the boot loader. Having switched to systemd, as an alternative to sysvinit and upstart, in Fedora 15, the project plans to replace further sysv init scripts with systemd units in version 16. Furthermore, Fedora is to offer everything that's required for Xen virtualisation, as version 3.0 of the Linux kernel, which is now expected to be released on Friday, will include all the necessary components."
The full post is available[2].
Google Web Fonts prove free fonts are flourishing (Linux Pro Magazine)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1]:
"Historically, fonts have been a weak point in free software. There were probably two reasons: first, programmers were mostly indifferent to fonts, and, second, font designers were concerned about how their work might be used. However, in the last five years, the problem has been largely corrected, as a look at the Google Web Fonts page shows."
The full post is available[2].
National meet on Free Open Source Software (ExpressBuzz.com)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1]:
"KOCHI: The Federal Institute of Science and Technology will organise a two-day national conference on Free Open Source Software. The conference organised by the Computer Science Department of FISAT and the FISAT Free Software Cell will be held on FISAT campus on August 26 and 27.
In the two-day meet, Praseed Pai, author of ‘Slang For .net’, will speak on Cross Platform Development. Shakti Kannan, Ambassador of Fedora, Pune, and Ranjith Siji, Chief Technology Officer of Walking Ant Technologies will speak on other sessions."
The full post is available[2].
Infographic sums up Linux then and now (Geek.com)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1]:
"One of the most telling stats, based on information gathered from LinuxCon registrations this year, is how the different distributions have won or lost favor with users. Although Fedora used to hold nearly half the market share (45%), it has now dropped firmly into second place (28%) behind the growing popularity of Ubuntu (34%). One positive aspect of this change is more distributions are getting users’ attention and use, and Linux Mint has recently joined the more well-known and older distros on the list."
The full post is available[2].
Feature preview of Fedora 16 installer
Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1]:
"GPT, the GUID Partition Table, is an alternate disk partition table scheme that solves two problems associated with the MBR (Master boot Record) partition table. It allows the configuration of more than four primary partitions, the maximum supported by MBR, and also supports disk partitions of more than 2 TB. So GPT will be the default partition table scheme on Fedora 16"
The full post is available[2].
Fedora Postpones Switch To Btrfs; Fedora 17 Is Now The Target Release For The Switch
Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1]:
"The Fedora developers have listened and have decided that Fedora 16 will not use Btrfs by default. The announcement was made by Josef Bacik, Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat. Bacik, however, mentioned that Btrfs is still being considered as the default filesystem for future release of Fedora. The target release to have Btrfs by default has been shifted to Fedora 17 now."
The full post is available[2].
Fedora 16 to skip btrfs by default (Network World)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1]:
"I'm actually encouraged by the fact that btrfs is being delayed for default for another release. It shows that the Fedora release process and objectives are working well. Bacik has also displayed a great deal of patience (as far as I've seen, anyway) with bug reports and complaints while working to get it up to speed."
The full post is available[2].
Fedora not to switch to Btrfs in version 16
Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1]:
"Recently, it became apparent that Btrfs has not met the stipulated criteria. The main reason for this continues to be the still ongoing development of a decent program for testing and repairing Btrfs file systems. Bacik had previously hoped that such a program would be released in May; now, the developer has mentioned a time frame of "a few weeks", but has also said that the developers' target is the Linux Plumbers Conference, which will start on 7 September. The Fedora project will probably make a second attempt to switch in Fedora 17."
The full post is available[2].
Oracle, SUSE, Red Hat drive 70% of LibreOffice development (ZDNet.com)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1]:
"Upon the release of LibreOffice 3.4.2, the Document Foundation announced that Oracle and SUSE each contributes roughly 25 percent of the latest commits, while Red Hat contributed another 20 percent. Following Oracle’s donation of Openoffice to the Apache Foundation earlier this year, The Document Foundation wants to reassure the technology public that corporate support for LibreOffice is strong and that this Office suite is “enterprise ready.”
The full post is available[2].
Can GNOME 3 Become the Next Big Open Source Contender? (TheVarGuy.com)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1]:
"There’s a lot to like about GNOME Shell in its current form. It’s functional, graceful and arguably more intuitive than Canonical’s Unity, which suffers, for instance, from the lack of any means for adding virtual desktops other than editing gconf values by hand."
The full post is available[2].
Praise for Fedora 15 and KDE 4.6.x - A great experience!
Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1]:
"Some old time Fedora users may be aware of Fedora's poor track record when it comes to KDE although things have been changing ever since the release of KDE 4.x. I regularly try Fedora KDE and so far haven't been fully convinced with the experience until now.
As a fan of both Fedora and KDE it gives me pleasure to say Fedora 15 with KDE 4.6.x is a great experience!"
The full post is available[2].
Living with Fedora – A Debian/Ubuntu User’s Take on Fedora 15
Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1]:
"If I was to sum up my opinion on Fedora 15 in one sentence, it’d have to be “Rough, but with great potential“. Gnome 3 is still a baby, and Fedora took a bold step by pushing it to the forefront, and I applaud them for that. As cozy as it may be, there’s still a whole lot of polish left to be done. The front-end is still rough, and the back-end doesn’t seem to have yet caught up with all the changes. If Fedora can manage to take the successes in this release (which are many) and smooth out some of those rough spots (which are also many), then Fedora 16 is likely to pull a lot of users away from Ubuntu permanently. From the looks of it, I’ll be one of them."
The full post is available[2].
Linux at 20, some personal memories
Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1]:
"By this time, summer of 1991, we had both started posting to Usenet. In August, Linus mentioned his kernel project on comp.os.minix for the first time. Later on, he decided to make the code available, and got one of the admins of ftp.funet.fi to put it there. For this, the project needed a name. Linus wanted to call it Freax, but Ari Lemmke, the ftp.funet.fi admin, decided to call it Linux instead. You can find the Freax name in the Makefile of the earliest Linux releases."
The full post is available[2].