Fedora 11 Leonidas To Be Released June 9

[linuxdoctor]

[Jacky]

[LP-SolidRaven]

[linuxdoctor]

[krt]

Noone cares linuxdoctor. Sheesh...
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[linuxdoctor]

He does, apparently.
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Misanthrope: someone who realizes that humans really are as stupid as they appear.
If you think I'm 'politically' incorrect you have the wrong politics.
Big business is a disease we will need to cure before we will ever achieve real prosperity.

[krt]

Doubt it, surely one or both of you are just trying to wind the other one up.
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[linuxdoctor]

And what do you think you're doing?

If you wanted to leave it alone the best thing for you to do is ignore it.

There is really only one rule to remember: I'm never wrong, and when I am, I'm still right. One of the privileges of being infallible, or at least having an infallible persona.

It's all just PBPP to me.
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Misanthrope: someone who realizes that humans really are as stupid as they appear.
If you think I'm 'politically' incorrect you have the wrong politics.
Big business is a disease we will need to cure before we will ever achieve real prosperity.

[krt]

Touche.

Aside: We know it's at least a fair bit more than just PBPP to you
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[Jacky]

[linuxdoctor]

[linuxdoctor]

Ok, I've had about a month to evaluate Fedora 11 on the x86_64.

First of all, the new release is about as I expected it to be. It is yet another evolutionary step forward and as such they have done a good job. It is complete, secure and fairly nice to use. They have put more under the SELinux security umbrella making Fedora possibly the most secure of the free distros. I turn it all off because as a developer the security features tend to get in the way. For corporate users this is a must and for home users a very useful thing.

Some things are still just not there yet. Gnash, the Flash Shockwave emulator, isn't complete. There are too many plugins for Firefox that just don't work in the x86_64 platform (everything from Adobe for instance) and it becomes annoying after awhile.

This is not the fault of the distribution mind you, but of the relative level that the native AMD architecture has been adopted, that is to say, minimal.

There doesn't seem to be any overall performance improvement running my AMD Athlon in native 64-bit mode or in 32-bit mode that I can detect. Several applications actual ran slower in native x86_64 mode than in i686 mode. One particular application, Stellarium, actually ran very much worse. Stellarium is a nice astronomical programme that I've been playing with and I've compiled it from source for both my AMD Athlon 3000 which has a 2.3 Ghz processor and my HP nc6220 laptop which runs a 1.73 GHz Pentium M. Even though the Athlon has twice the performance capability of the Pentium, Stellarium runs slower on the faster machine. V-e-r-y m-u-c-h s-l-o-w-e-r. That was not the only application that does run slower, but it was the one that ran the slowest.

Recompiling Stellarium for the same machine but using GCC 4.4.0 to generate generic i686 code rather than i86_64 code resulted in a significantly faster performance on the same machine. Based on that, I decided to reinstall the Fedora 11 distribution and use the i386 version instead.

I don't know why the 64-bit system's performance is not any better the 32-bit version running on the same machine. I've considered the possibility that it could be a hardware issue. The board may not handle 64-bit wide memory access properly. If memory pathways are still only 32-bits wide the board will need extra circuitry to handle 64-bit memory access possibly inserting extra wait states in between. This generally results in significantly slower write times compared to two back-to-back 32-bit writes and sometimes slower reads as well.

That is only speculation on my part, however. I have seen this sort of thing happen on board designs in the past back when the boards were making the 16 to 32-bit transition. Anything is possible.

However, this has nothing to do with the Fedora distribution. It's a still a nice distro and I recommend it.

This is the third Fedora distro that I've installed since I decided to stick to one supplier. Previously I was installing a different distribution every time I upgraded my hardware. About three years ago I decided to stick with one and Fedora was it. The decision was not based on any preference. I'm happy with every distribution I've tried (except Ubuntu which I consider a toy). Fedora just happened to be the distribution I was using at the time.
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Misanthrope: someone who realizes that humans really are as stupid as they appear.
If you think I'm 'politically' incorrect you have the wrong politics.
Big business is a disease we will need to cure before we will ever achieve real prosperity.

[Rashy]

I installed Fedora to a partition on my laptop (turned out to a be a big hassle of installation since I didn't know about the "/" "/boot" and "swap" partitions I had to setup since /boot can't be ext4).

I had some performance issues with Fedora 11, notably when I tried to use anything 3D. XFCE seems to have dropped the ball when it comes to the volume-control applet, scrolling the dial on the front of my laptop didn't adjust the volume until I added it as a keyboard shortcut (gnome handled it just fine). I read about many other people who were having the same problem with volume-control. I also had difficulty getting MPD to work. Every time I started playing a song, it would lock-up and restart. Compiling from source was a nightmare for all the dependencies I had to hunt down, then it didn't recognize the codecs... at least Rhythmbox is still good!

One thing that I was impressed with about Fedora 11 is that all my hardware worked right out of the box. I had to apply a quick fix to get my headphone jacks working (which I have to do with every distro), but wireless card, card reader, and everything worked flawlessly. Overall a good desktop, and once I figure out the performance problem then it will be a great desktop.
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Rashy!

[LP-SolidRaven]

Well Rashy, you have to install graphics drivers for 3D to work fast.
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Dilly dally, shilly shally.

[Rashy]