Fedora 13
Well it’s often been said that “it never rains but it pours” and that seems very true about distro releases in the last two weeks. Fedora 13 has just been released. Fedora 13 follows hot on the heels of Ubuntu Linux 10.04. So how does it match up? Is it worth using? Read on to find out.
What’s New In This Release
Desktop users have some interesting new features to enjoy. Here’s a sample of what you’ll find:
Automatic print driver install
Automatic language packs install
Package kit integration
NetworkManager improvements
Free and open source nouveau driver for NVidia video cards
Shotwell replaces Gthumb and F-Spot for photos
Pino social media client included
Deja Dup backup tool
Simple Scan
GNOME color manager
GNOME 2.30
Nautilus enhancements
Gnote enhancements
Rhythmbox support for iPod Touch and iPhone music
Abiword removed from default live image
I’ll cover the removal of Abiword in the problems section; suffice to say I wasn’t pleased with the near complete lack of bundled office software in this release.
Automatic Printer Driver Installation
If you plug in a supported USB printer, Fedora will automatically install the appropriate driver for it. This feature should make life easier for Fedora desktop users. I hate messing around with printer drivers, so anything that makes it easier and faster is welcome indeed.
Pino Social Media Client
I’m happy to see that Pino is now included in the Fedora 13 desktop, but it’s too limited. Gwibber connects to more social media services than Pino. Pino appears to be limited to Twitter and Identi.ca. I’m not sure why the Fedora developers went with Pino instead of Gwibber. Let me know in the comments if you know anything about why they made that decision. I’m not knocking Pino; it’s okay for what it is. But why not go with something that connects to more services?
Pino lets you connect to your Twitter account.
Package Kit Integration
I’m not a big user of Brasero but if you are, you’ll be pleased to find out that Brasero can now automatically install codecs needed to burn audio CDs. File-roller can also now automatically install the necessary items to handle archive formats.
Brasero can now automatically add codecs for burning audio CDs.
GNOME Color Manager
If you need accuracy in color then you’re going to love the fact that Fedora 13 includes the GNOME Color Manager. You can install, manage and generate color profiles for your Fedora 13 system. I have no particular use for this but it will be quite useful for artists and others who require it.
You can install, manage and generate color profiles.
Shotwell
As if it’s not bad enough that GIMP is being displaced by F-Spot in a lot of distros, now F-Spot itself is being displaced by Shotwell in Fedora 13. Shocking! Just kidding.
Frankly, this doesn’t matter to me a bit since I don’t have much use for either of them. GIMP is available via the Add/Remove Software tool so that’s the first thing I’d download for image editing, rather than bothering with Shotwell or F-Spot.
Shotwell works well enough though for a basic photo manager. You can import photos, organize events, use tags, publish photos to Facebook/Picasa/Flickr, reduce red-eye, and rotate/mirror/crop photos. It will probably meet the photo management needs of most desktop users.
Shotwell replaces F-Spot as Fedora 13's photo manager.
Free Nouveau Driver for NVidia
This release builds on Fedora 12′s experimental support for ATI cards. This time around Fedora is supporting 3D via the free, open source nouveau driver for Nvidia cards.
On the next page, I’ll cover the hardware requirements and I’ll show you what it’s like to install Fedora 13.
(14 votes, average: 2.71 out of 5)
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I upgraded my installation of Fedora 12 to 13 today – normally I wait until a little after release day, but F12 was so sluggish that I was anxious to see if I could get some relief. What I found was even worse – my firefox would not launch, it corrupted its settings files, flash videos froze in full screen, and the keyboard layout switcher in gnome, which never worked right in F12 and was going to go away in F13, continued to not work right.
I didn’t wait long before installing Ununtu Lucid on my machine – in my opinion the best Linux release I have ever yet seen. By the end of the day I am up and running more smoothly than I ever have on this computer, and I have turned over a new leaf. As I write this, not having to wait for pages to scroll, no choppy desktop effects, everything smooth as butter, I have a feeling I have turned over a new leaf.
a fair review
Fedora has a different perspective on what their distro should be than distros like ubuntu…. Ubuntu is aimed at newbies and tries to provide a complete out of the box experience with minimal user input….
Fedora aims at intermediate/advanced users… They have said themselves that they want a community of contributors rather than just users…. Fedora requires more user input than alot of distros and I don’t think they will ever aim to make it as user friendly as ubuntu
in saying that… although I like Ubuntu and Fedora very much (though my main distro is Arch linux) I feel that Fedora/redhat contribute to the open source community alot which benefits everybody where as Ubuntu/canonical take alot from the community and don’t contribute much in return and seem to only make improvements to “ubuntu” and leave the rest of the community out.
Therefore I get that cold feeling you mention when I use Ubuntu and get a rather warm fuzzy feeling when using Fedora :)
Thanks for the review.
“Let me know in the comments if you know anything about why they made that decision. I’m not knocking Pino; it’s okay for what it is. But why not go with something that connects to more services?”
Gwibber brings in a pile of dependencies via desktopcouch, and it would be the only thing we shipped that used it. It’d make the desktop spin oversized and necessitate the removal of something else. So we went with Pino, which fits nicely.
“There doesn’t seem to be much of a Fedora 13 bootsplash screen. There’s just a black screen, with a blue/white bar at the bottom and the words “Fedora 13? in text.”
I spy with my little eye…another reviewer reviewing in a VM. =) You only get Fedora’s graphical splash screen, by default, if you’re using a graphics adapter that can do kernel mode setting. That’s ATI, Intel and NVIDIA adapters – so almost every real hardware system in use these days, but not virtual machines, which emulate weirder graphics hardware. You can specify a vga= kernel parameter to get a graphical splash screen with other video adapters, if you like, but we don’t do this by default (it can introduce problems in odd cases, and we figure it’s not worth the potential trouble when most real systems will get a splash via KMS).
“There doesn’t seem to be a way to add your own repositories to Fedora 13.”
This isn’t true, of course. Repositories are specified in /etc/yum.conf or (preferred method) separate files in /etc/yum.repos.d , and you can add any repository you like this way. There’s no graphical way to do it, true, because we figure this is a pretty tiny use case. Public repositories can simply provide a .rpm package which installs a file in /etc/yum.repos.d/ to set up the repository; this is what popular Fedora repos do. Just look at how RPM Fusion works for an example.
“As I’ve noted in previous reviews, it would be nice if flash were installed by default.”
A little research would have explained this. One of Fedora’s four key principles is freedom. Due to this, we don’t ship or promote non-free software, including Flash. If a decent F/OSS implementation of Flash were available we’d ship that by default, but we don’t consider any of the existing options good enough to include by default at present.
Adam, thanks for the excellent feedback and answers to my questions.
Adam beat me to it in terms of responding to some of the explanations of why Fedora is what it is, but let’s be clear that this distribution is primarily intended for developers and testers to improve the state of the art. It is quite a test bed for new applications and new ideas. As such, I do not consider it a “Beginner” system at all, except that it certainly is straightforward to install. It does not pretend to be anything that it is not, and the forums and other easy to find documentation explains very well how you can extend and modify it to achieve a result similar to what you see with common desktop environments, but again, I just do not see that as the focal point; I see a very good development platform as the sweet spot, not catering to the whims of beginners. While Fedora is certainly not difficult to install or even to master, it’s not fair to pin it with the same expectations as a consumer oriented Ubuntu system. It’s a developer oriented system. Just as Ubuntu meets the consumer oriented objectives well, Fedora meets the developer oriented objectives well. If you rate it in that context, then I think that Fedora fares much better. Does anyone agree with that?
I think if you get the DVD version of the installer you will get all what you want easily. My only concern is the NVIDIA driver as it was a pain with Fedora 12, even when I installed it from rpmfusion the visual effects didn’t work. I hope this is changed in this release.
I keep wanting to really like your article but somehow it leaves me a bit off. Im not sure why. Maybe because its unremarkable. … The biased is so obvious you might as well just spell it out. Also I dont know wtf you did but Open Office was installed on my Fedora 13 install, a complete and total office suite. GIMP also was installed. What sets fedora apart? From a GNU/Linux perspective? Nothing, as no distributions do. Aside from that how about the fact its the base plate that leads to an enterprise level supported product(Red Hat). Personally I say who cares what you use just so long as its GNU/Linux. Personally Im loving F13.
daeamarth: “Also I dont know wtf you did but Open Office was installed on my Fedora 13 install, a complete and total office suite. GIMP also was installed.”
The reviewer installed from the live CD, which has a pretty restricted amount of space. You likely installed from DVD or network install.
Not much more to add since others have already said pretty much everything I would have pointed out, however one thing that I would like to say is the nouveau driver for Nvidia cards provided by Fedora works like a treat. I installed the required experimental mesa drivers and have been playing 3D games, using 3D desktops, etc, all on the opensource nouveau driver. It’s great, and I really can’t sing it’s praises loud enough.
I’ve upgraded from Fedora 12 to 13 and it is a much better experience than the 11 to 12 upgrade. The biggest hassle for me was to remove the nouveau drivers and get the NVidia drivers to work. I appreciate that the nouveau drivers work great but they didn’t cut it for me (3D stuff). I would really like to see this switch out to work better in Fedora 14. Ubuntu does a great job with that.
The things that are greatly improved from my view is that the audio is working a bit better and I can use a sip softphone where it was trouble (not usable) in previous 11 and 12 releases. The gnome file manager is using the explorer type nautilus, and has significantly improved file management experience. That alone makes using Fedora 13 a must-upgrade. And finally, the boot time is much quicker, though not nearly as quick as Ubuntu 10.04 — that rocks!