“This is Fedora!". Leonidas is in command!

After a minor 2 week delay, the diligent Fedora project just announced the release of Fedora 11.

The Fedora 11 Feature List seems rather spectacular with many big (and small) inclusions. There really are too many updates to list, some of the the highlights:

Desktop

• GNOME 2.26 - Disk burning, Simpler file sharing, Better volume control, Media player enhancements
• KDE 4.2.2 - more updates to KDE4
• XFCE 4.6
• Better font installer
• Faster startup (20 seconds to get to Gnome)

Administration/Hardware/System

• DeltaRPM support - faster, smaller downloads for updates
• Bluetooth Improvements
• Default EXT4 Filesystem
• Nouveau Driver as Default for Nvidia Video Cards

SoftwareUpdates

• Firefox 3.5(beta) - HTML5 and native video support
• Thunderbird 3.0
• Kernel 2.6.29
• Netbeans 6.5 - popular IDE (alternative to Eclipse)
• X-Server 1.6

You can download Fedora 11 using the standard mirrors or using the Torrent (recommended).

Please user the Fedora-List mailing list or any of the forums for help. I have published my Personal Fedora 11 Installation Guide which is quite similar to Fedora 10 (but with less issues)!

If you try Fedora 11, on the surface you may not notice how many major and minor improvements have been worked into this release. Download, install and explore and I’m sure you will realize the positive changes in this rapidly moving distribution.

Posted in: Distributions, F11, Fedora, Miscellaneous,

Currently I am subscribed to 19 mailing lists and there are a handful more that I plan on joining (when I get around to it). The benefits of a mailing list (especially in the Linux world) is the massive amount of useful information that is often shared by developers and experienced users that may not be found elsewhere (assuming you ignore the useless discussions).

I often link to web page posts to mailing lists on this site. For example, anything posted to the fedora-list can be seen at the fedora-list Archives. Or if you have ever read Fedora News this is done a lot!

What I would really like is for a quick method to get from the email in my mail client to the email’s URL at the given mailing list archive. I think of this as some sort of “mailing list permalink”. Since not everyone signs up for mailing lists, I want a quicker way of sharing useful information sometimes buried in the archives.

With the number of mailing lists I use, the only practical mail client is Google’s Gmail, and of course I pretty much only use Mozilla Firefox. So I imagine a Firefox Extension and/or a Grease Monkey script could insert a link into each Gmail message, or perhaps a “Right-Click > Search for this email at the archives” option on the context menu? … Alternatively, I would even consider switching to a desktop email client (Mozilla Thunderbird is really the only choice) if I could install some sort of plugin/extension to do the same thing.

Has anyone ever considered this? Does some combination of software achieve this? I welcome any ideas or suggestions on how to do this. I plan to investigate this further and maybe even start up my own project if I get some time.

Posted in: Linux, Miscellaneous, Software,

I finally got around to signing up with the microblogging site Identi.ca. Apparently it’s where the true geeks are! I used the handle [mjmwired](http://identi.ca/mjmwired) to make this more specific to my site and technical stuff. For the time being, unless I know someone, I am subscribing only to Linux and Fedora related people and groups. I hope to change that.

I am currently following a group of Fedora developers and contributors that have participated in mailing lists or have a blog, etc. Most are above my league, but my intention is only to silently listen to the traffic there.

If you’re on Identi.ca let me know and I’ll subscribe to anyone who visits my site, reads my blog, has sent me an email or wants to communicate. I honestly would like to better connect with my readers. I’m hoping this will be fun and interesting!

As always if you want to send me any message, I appreciate any and all comments through my standard contact form.

Posted in: Fedora, Miscellaneous,

While open source PDF readers have significantly improved, many people still use Adobe Reader. While Adobe has had a mixed history of supporting their software in Linux/Unix, recently they have significantly improved.

There is a well written post about installer formats on the Acroread Unix blog. I recommend just reading over the post, even if you do not use Adobe software. They have a simple list of the most popular formats (BIN, RPM, DEB, PKG, TAR.GZ) as well as minor pros and cons of each. The information really is not specific to Adobe.

When software is not open source (specifically when users cannot repackage in whatever format they like), it is good to provide information like this to educate users (customers) who may not be admins.

Posted in: Linux, Miscellaneous, Software,

There was another useless post on Slashdot asking what did you first do with Linux?. I thought it would be interesting to recollect that experience. Sorry for the detail, my memory produces lots of random tidbits.

I was fortunate enough to attend an engineering school with the latest technologies that were available in the market. Which basically means we had Sun Ultra Workstations, running Solaris Operating System using CDE. So for me “Unix = Sun”. That was 1997 and I was incredibly impressed. I never even knew of Linux till 1998, when one incredibly over achieving colleague mentioned he was going to use an old 386 to run Linux. I immediately thought he meant “unix”, so my first question was: “Don’t you need a more powerful computer?”. Keep in mind the Pentium MMX was the state of the art consumer desktop at the time. And that’s when I first heard it on a bus, in the winter, heading to the engineering campus: “Linux can run on anything! Even really old hardware!". So began my interest.

Later in 1999 when my programming classes got more involved, I was finding that Borland C++ 5.0 on Windows NT 4.0 was not sufficient compared to GCC on Sun. A co-worker of my brother suggested Linux but warned me that I need to be very careful to make sure I check the video card support under the X-server (XFree86 at the time). Ironically that warning still holds true to this day! Luckily my Matrox Mystique 4MB was in the “supported list”!

In the late 1990’s you could find the most popular linux, RedHat, on shelves at your local Best Buy retailer. I had seen version 6.0 on sale, but by the time I got around to purchasing it, sure enough version 6.1 was there. As I recall it was only 1 CD and 1 CD full of source code (I think I still have those CD’s somewhere). By the time I figured out how to repartition my hard-drive and actually get linux to work (I think the 3rd installation I got it right), I was told version 6.2 was available! This (sometimes annoying) trend still persists today as well.

Due to my experience with CDE on Sun, I immediately thought KDE was the same thing. So I just started using Gnome. Everything was foreign, but since it was so much easier than Solaris, I liked it a lot. Not long after I became comfortable with Redhat, I heard that Pogo Linux was giving away free linux CD’s. This was great since finding someone to make me a copy was impossible and copying at school a big pain. I got copies of Caldera, TurboLinux, Mandrake, and maybe others? I don’t really remember all the versions I tried from them. The only one that stood out was Mandrake and I loved it for its cool selection of software and included niceties (especially “color gcc” - which made cryptic C errors fun again!). Unfortunately all those little additions came with their price. I found Mandrake incredibly unstable compared to RedHat (it could have been my inexperience) so I switched back. I stuck with RedHat till Fedora, but that’s another story altogether.

So that’s my brief exposure to Linux from 1999 to 2001. It was all caused by a requirement to use gcc for school work but ended with a lot of random discoveries. I never saw it in day-to-day activities - so instead I went and found it myself.

What was your first linux experience?

Posted in: Linux, Miscellaneous, Red Hat,