Fedora 17 "Beefy Miracle" Released

[nhasian]

Fedora 17 has been released today!

Feature List

You can download it here

 

[amdfangirl]

What's interesting is that it's 64bit...

By default!

 

[nhasian]

yeah I'm surprised Canonical didn't recommend 64bit Ubuntu 12.04 by default. I know they discussed doing so at the developer summit. Entry level desktops and laptops have had 4 gigs of ram by default for a couple of years now. On a different note remember when they were trying to make btrfs the default file system for the last two releases of Fedora? The installer doesnt even support btrfs at ALL in the fedora 17 release. it worked in the last one but if you try to make or edit a btrfs filesystem during installation it will error out. Its a known issue in the release notes and will be resolved in Fedora 18. Hopefully they will have the new graphical installer by then too.

 

[amdfangirl]

Well I mean like desktops since something like 2005 or so have been 64bit capable...

I don't see the point of installing Fedora 17 on a machine without a dual-core CPU at the very least.

I'm iffy about brtfs, going to wait for it to mature. The Phoronix benchmarks (with SSD) indicate that ext4 is still the best filesystem in terms of performance for Linux.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_34_fs&num=1

 

[nhasian]

I remember reading that Phoronix article. they didnt enable any of the btrfs filesystem options like compression that improves the performance. Also it is really awesome how you can take snapshots of the filesystem and rollback to an earlier date if there was a problem. How can btrfs mature if no one uses it? I believe Oracle is making it the default filesystem now. the only thing holding it back from wide spread adoption I think is the fsck

 

[amdfangirl]

Oracle's Linux is using as their default.

I'm skeptical, I'll wait for it to have its bugs ironed out first. Perhaps I'll adopt later when RHEL does.

I'm normally all for new technology, except for when a failure of aforementioned technology can cause file loss.

 

[crazysanchez]

I'm not always the guy who tries the new thing first, but it sounds great. Already downloaded.

 

[Ijack]

the only thing holding it back from wide spread adoption I think is the fsck

That's a very big "only" IMO. I'm not about to install a file system that doesn't have a reliable recovery utility. It's a shame that politics has prevented ZFS from being widely used in Linux; it offers everything that btrfs does, and more. And it is now a very stable and reliable fs.

This sort of thing is why I prefer FreeBSD to Linux.

 

[nhasian]

Actually I've been using Fedora 17 since Alpha1 which I think was back in February. I also have Xubuntu 12.04 running on a 7 year old Dell laptop.
Both work great.

any good review and comparison with Ubuntu 12.04

 

[randomizer]

Btrfs is still marked as EXPERIMENTAL. Take that as you will, but clearly some people don't think it's at a point where it should be used in a production environment yet, and those people are working on the kernel.

 

[Ijack]

As expected, there have been quite a few updates to Fedora 17 since its general release. Just as well I'm on unlimited downloads!

The latest one includes the 3.4 kernel. That's quite early adoption by a mainstream distribution. I'll have to read up on what new things there are in it.

 

[Ijack]

Oops - already been posted.