Mauriat Miranda     mjmwired

Fedora 8 Released

Do you fear the “Werewolf” ***** ?

The Fedora project just released Fedora 8 with a great deal of enthusiasm. Fedora had been slipping behind in the past few releases and there have always been quality issues, but the team hopes this release will put them back on track.

The highlights from the Release Summary:

Graphics/Multimedia

  • PulseAudio - A revamped sound system addressing many of the limitations and problems with older Linux sound systems.
  • CodecBuddy - A tool to help install codecs and multimedia formats that Fedora cannot legally or ethically distribute directly.
  • Compiz / Compiz-Fusion - Improvements on the Linux hardware accelerated user interface including cool effects.

Administration/Hardware

  • Network Manager - significant improvements for wireless network management.
  • Firewall Administration is much more user friendly.
  • Package Manager - You can install software using your media (DVD). Finally! We lost this in Fedora Core 5!
  • PolicyKit - When accessing restricted tasks or hardware you now have a much more user-friendly password prompt
  • Improved Laptop support
  • Improved Bluetooth support
  • Improved power management support

Desktop

  • Gnome 2.20, KDE 3.5.8, Xfce 4.4.1 (unfortunately KDE4 was delayed by the KDE team)
  • GNOME Online Desktop - An application on the desktop to interface with online applications like GMail, Photobucket, Facebook, EBay, Wikipedia, and countless others
  • New desktop theme

Java

  • IcedTea - This is a Fedora packaged version of the Java that Sun open sourced in the OpenJDK project. Now a working Java plus browser plugin comes included in Fedora.

SoftwareUpdates

  • Eclipse 3.3
  • OpenOffice 2.3.0
  • Kernel 2.6.23

You can download Fedora 8 using the standard mirrors or using the Torrent (recommended).

Please user the Fedora-List mailing list or any of the forums for help. There are some basic tips provided in my Personal Fedora 8 Installation Guide which should be updated within the week with the installation.

The release so far looks much more polished than the past few. I hope it is well received!

  • The Werewolf would have been much cooler if the release somehow made it on October 31! Oh well.

UPDATE - NOTE please DO NOT COMMENT here if you have problems with my Install Guide, use the CONTACT form with a proper email address. THANK YOU.

Posted in: Distributions, F8, Fedora, Miscellaneous,

10 Comments:

  • Ahmed on November 10, 2007 - 11:11 AM

    hi
    i really appreciate your work at Fedora installation guide , really helpful but when i try to install the msttcorefonts i got a problem saying that there is no /usr/sbin/chkfontpath
    this error occurs only in Fedora 8 .

    Thanks

  • Mauriat on November 10, 2007 - 12:12 PM

    Ahmed:

    Fedora 8 no longer include ‘XFS’ which is what the truetype fonts RPM is looking for. The fonts should not be necessary in F8, however if you still wish to install them, use ‘yum localinstall’.
    https://mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f8.html#ttf

  • Ahmed on November 10, 2007 - 05:17 PM

    Mauriat :

    thanks for reply , at first i try the ‘yum localinstall’ and it told me that the package is not signed
    so i nstall libFS , chkfontpath , xorg-x11-xfs by yum and then install msttcorefont package
    and it works 100% :)

    i really appreciate your help

    thank you very much :)

  • Mauriat on November 11, 2007 - 11:23 PM

    My mistake, forgot the –nogpgcheck.
    Fixed now.

  • Lucas Peetz Dulley on November 13, 2007 - 12:12 PM

    Hi there!

    Your fedora install guides are a lot of help. I recommend them to all my buddies.
    And I also use them all the time, whenever I need them I just google “mjmwired” and off I go Installing Fedora with ease, one more time. No need to remember all the install steps by heart anymore… :) I love it.

    Have you tried the new compiz-fusion stuff? I am having a hard time trying to get it to work and all that eye-candy and “Exposé” stuff. I bet a lot of people are stuck like me.

    Thank you for the Fedora guides, they are life/time savers.

  • Mauriat on November 15, 2007 - 12:00 AM

    Lucas:

    Thanks.
    Everytime I turn on Compiz in any fashion I use it for all of 5 minutes. I tried all the beryl stuff a while ago in FC6 (probably a lot has since changed) but I never found it useful enough. I guess I’ll give it a go when I get the chance.

  • Aiace on November 17, 2007 - 02:14 PM

    Hi, Mauriat.
    I have been greatly appreciating your timely efforts explaining Fedora install process and more tricks “under the hood”…
    However this time (i.e., Fedora 8) I could not install msttcorefonts via llocalinstall.
    Here is the output:
    [Aiace@localhost Scrivania]$ su -c ‘yum –nogpgcheck localinstall msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm’
    Parola d’ordine:
    Setting up Local Package Process
    Examining msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm: msttcorefonts - 2.0-1.noarch
    msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm: does not update installed package.
    Nothing to do

    However, as you can see here
    [Aiace@localhost Scrivania]$ yum list msttcorefont*
    Error: No matching Packages to list
    I have not got it by now.
    What would you suggest to do, as I do not want to install also xorg-x11-xfs and chkfontpath, which are required dependencies ?
    Thanks a lot in advance for your enlightening suggestions!

  • Mauriat on November 17, 2007 - 03:15 PM

    Aiace:

    The truetype font was made for the XFS server. F8 has removed xfs so,
    you cannot use this rpm without it. The localinstall is the way to force the download of xorg-x11-xfs and chkfontpath.

    The only thing I can recommend is to decompress the rpm and manually install the fonts. I am working on this. So for now, you must install the dependancies, modify it yourself or wait till I or someone else makes the changes in an RPM.

  • Malachai on November 17, 2007 - 06:18 PM

    Thank you for the guide on FC8. I always check this site when I move into a new version of fedora.

    Question: Is there a simple way to make ipw3945 work right? I just installed FC8 and my wireless is not working.

    Please email me or post any kind of help would be good.

    –Malachai–

  • Mauriat on November 18, 2007 - 11:11 AM

    Malachai:

    Try the following if it helps:
    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common#head-a4b01d2dd0b0137a2661eb978771f20749ce3854