Unixster

I’ve been holding onto a bunch of audio since the SCALE 7x show in February, and it’s way past time to start unleashing it. Rather than take an extra six months to start cutting the audio, I’m just going to post it here in its gory entirety. Today I have my interview with Karsten Wade, whose official title is Fedora community gardener. See … he’s a gardener because he’s growing community for the Fedora Project.

Fedora is a giant among giants, in the shadow of a giant from which it was born. But every giant is born of humble beginnings. So to understand the giant, you first have to understand from where they came. So let me take you through a short history of Fedora, and show you where it all began, and some of the interesting, if not curious steps that it took to become what it is today. To start with the very deepest roots, we need to look to the kernel that makes Fedora what it is: The Linux Kernel. That was first introduced in 1991 by a then college student named Linus Torvalds.

The Ubuntu team this morning released a second alpha of the upcoming Karmic Koala operating system, also known as Ubuntu 9.10. While it is still early days for Karmic, this release does give some insight into plans for the final release, scheduled for October this year.

Major changes over previous editions of Ubuntu include Gnome 2.27.1, the latest development release, as well as the latest Linux kernel, version 2.6.30, which was released just a couple of days ago.

Just like Fedora 11, released earlier this week, Karmic Koala now also sports the ext4 filesystem by default, a move that has long been anticipated.

Also now included by default is GRUB 2, the new default bootloader.

With plans firmly in place to reach a 10-second startup by Ubuntu 10.4, Karmic includes a new kernel mode setting feature which the team is hoping will reduce video mode switching flicker at booting and dramatically speed up suspend and resume processes.

Karmic Koala Alpha 2 can be downloaded from one of these places:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/karmic/alpha-2/ (Ubuntu Desktop, Server, and Netbook Remix)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-2/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-2/ (Xubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/karmic/alpha-2/ (Ubuntu ARM)

The Fedora team yesterday released latest version of its Linux operating system, Fedora 11. The much-anticipated release from the Red Hat-backed community team promises to be one of the best Linux releases to date with Fedora’s reputation for making Linux as easy as possible increasing with each new release.

On the desktop Fedora includes Gnome 2.26 and KDE 4.2 based on a 2.6.29.3 kernel. Underneath the team has decided to make ext4 the default filesystem.

With most operating systems targeting faster boot-up times Fedora is no exception and users can expect a 20 second boot up from the new release on most hardware.

Another feature in Fedora 11 aimed at improving usability include automatic font and mime-type installation using PackageKit. PackageKit was first introduced in Fedora 9 to manage software and in Fedora 10 it was able to automatically install codecs on demand. In Fedora 11 those capabilities have been improved and PackageKit can now automatically install fonts when needed for viewing and editing documents.

Fedora 11 also extends Fedora’s kernel modesetting (KMS) capabilities to improve graphical boot times. In previous releases KMS only supported some ATI cards. In Fedora 11 KMS now supports a range of additional cards including many from Intel and Nvidia as well as ATI.

Presto
In an effort to streamline software updates, Fedora 11 introduces Presto. Although not enabled by default in this release (it needs the yum-presto plugin) Presto reduces the amount of data that needs to be downloaded during software updates. Instead of replacing an entire package when it is updated Presto downloads just the differences between the old and new package, reducing downloads by up to 80% in some cases.

The release notes include detailed information on the changes included in Fedora 11. A full list of features included in Fedora 11 is also available. Downloads of Fedora 10 can be found here.