Fedora18 Schedule & Feature List

[AdamW]

dbelton: there was previously not really any criteria for partitioning at Beta.

Prior to F18 the partitioning criteria were rather simple, because there was a rather neat division in anaconda which effectively served our purposes. You had the screen which gave you a few different automatic partitioning choices - 'Use entire disk', 'Use free space', 'Replace existing Linux partitions', all of those. It had checkboxes for LVM and encryption. And then you had custom partitioning. That was it, the whole partitioning design.

For the criteria we rather took advantage of this. There was one Alpha criterion, which basically said 'the different autopart choices all have to work'. It used more complex wording, but that's basically what it meant: you had to be able to use each of the options on that screen, including the encryption and LVM checkboxes, and if you could, Alpha was A-OK. Then for Final, we required custom partitioning to work. That was it, nice and clean. (There was a criterion specifically about RAID at Beta time, but that was all).

For newui the design is rather different and more complicated, there isn't such a nice clean split any more. There's a more interactive 'automatic' process, which tries to guide you through freeing up space by shrinking or deleting partitions if you need to, and the custom partitioning mode, which you now need to use if you want to do encryption or LVM. So we felt we had to really redo the partitioning criteria from scratch, and focus more on functional requirements rather than just taking advantage of handy features of the installer design. So that's what we did. We did relax the criteria as part of this, but that was more a result of stepping back and taking a look at what we really believe needs to be possible at Alpha: we agreed that an Alpha release doesn't really need to be capable of behaving nicely alongside other OS installations, because Alphas are early test releases that are explicitly _not_ supposed to be put in production. For the purposes for which an Alpha is meant, all the installer really needs to be able to do is get an installation done, if the target disk is big enough. Anything more refined than that is properly Beta stuff, not Alpha.

BTW, the delay we just agreed is rather an unusual one. We didn't go to freeze, then build TCs and RCs, then have a go/no-go and decide we don't meet the Beta criteria so we have to slip; instead we decided we were going to evaluate the status of anaconda *before* we froze, and not freeze if we didn't think anaconda was really done enough to start the freeze. And that's what we decided; we're going to slip the freeze date by a week.

We'll probably turn this into a more formal process for future releases, since it seems like a good idea. The basic idea is that we shouldn't freeze for any release point if we're not code-complete for the requirements of that release point: we have to at least have code present that implements the major release requirements. It doesn't have to be _working_, those are the blocker bugs we can fix during the freeze period, but it at least has to be _there_. As things stood when we agreed the delay, the new upgrade code wasn't released yet (it still isn't), so we agreed not to freeze.

[lsatenstein]

After comparing the GUI changes with F18, against F17, I ask myself why the Show all icons is on the favorites bar. Is it to require me to do an extra click of the mouse. I already have carpal syndrome problems from too much left button clicking.

The things I would like on the favorites bar are
a) ability to have a shortcut to a folder of my choice.
b) to relocate it (favorites bar left, bottom, right side)

The worst Gnome3 feature is the upper left corner. Accidentally going there with the mouse (because the File menu command for most software is also in the left corner causes all the windows to lose focus, until I go back there again, or choose my window again. With a true mouse, this happens infrequently, but with a touch pad and sliding of fingers, it happens too often.

In another area, Instead of zero seconds hover time, it would be great to have 1 second delay, and/or a mouse click to bypass the delay.
I am lucky I do not have Parkinson's disease. I feel sorry for any Gnome user who does have it.

There must be a reason why the list of applications was placed at the bottom of the favorites bar. I have a feeling all the changes for Gnome are to drive us to using XFCE, KDE, Mate, or any other clean interface. (grin)

[DBelton]

Well, Gnome 3 has already driven quite a few old Gnome users to using another DE like Xfce, etc...

But your problems/issues are with Gnome, not something that Fedora can change. While Fedora might have a little leeway in changing a configuration option or two, for the most part you get stuck with whatever garbage the Gnome team decides to push on the users.

If you wish to be either completely ignored or told your opinions don't matter, you can try filing a bug with Gnome and see if possibly by some miracle you can get things changed.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/

If you do decide to file a bug with Gnome, I sure hope that you have much better results than I and numerous others have had in the past.

[cyborg]

Originally Posted by DBelton

Well, Gnome 3 has already driven quite a few old Gnome users to using another DE like Xfce, etc...

But your problems/issues are with Gnome, not something that Fedora can change. While Fedora might have a little leeway in changing a configuration option or two, for the most part you get stuck with whatever garbage the Gnome team decides to push on the users.

If you wish to be either completely ignored or told your opinions don't matter, you can try filing a bug with Gnome and see if possibly by some miracle you can get things changed.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/

If you do decide to file a bug with Gnome, I sure hope that you have much better results than I and numerous others have had in the past.

I thought you could still use Gnome 2 if you install it manually.

[DBelton]

There would probably be big problems trying to install Gnome 2 manually since there have been a lot of changes to the libs since Gnome 2 was last updated.

But, yes, you could pretty much install anything manually you wish to, if you want to go through the trouble to get things to work. Just because an application is no longer being updated or maintained doesn't mean that suddenly it can't be used.

[smr54]

Originally Posted by DBelton

If you wish to be either completely ignored or told your opinions don't matter, you can try filing a bug with Gnome and see if possibly by some miracle you can get things changed.

Insert marriage joke here.

[lutor]

hello
fedora 18 TC3 only installs on the hard drive clean. I tried installing rpm fusion free and non free, google chrome says it is not possible to install because they are not signed. in console i cant connect as root and says the password is wrong.

[expectATIon]

Originally Posted by lutor

hello
fedora 18 TC3 only installs on the hard drive clean. I tried installing rpm fusion free and non free, google chrome says it is not possible to install because they are not signed. in console i cant connect as root and says the password is wrong.

To install RPM Fusion free & non free run the following in a terminal

sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-branched.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-branched.noarch.rpm

To install Google Talk or Chrome or Flash download the RPMs to a folder on your system. I chose Downloads and then run the following in a terminal to install the RPM. Example below is for Google Talk

cd Downloads
sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck google-talkplugin_current_x86_64.rpm

[lutor]

hello
I installed cinnamon but after reboot my monitor was just dark gray and after waiting a few minutes continued in the same beautiful. I've tried the cinnamon and the Mate and the same happens to me. the gnome's okay.

[AdamW]

Originally Posted by lsatenstein

After comparing the GUI changes with F18, against F17, I ask myself why the Show all icons is on the favorites bar. Is it to require me to do an extra click of the mouse. I already have carpal syndrome problems from too much left button clicking.

The things I would like on the favorites bar are
a) ability to have a shortcut to a folder of my choice.
b) to relocate it (favorites bar left, bottom, right side)

The worst Gnome3 feature is the upper left corner. Accidentally going there with the mouse (because the File menu command for most software is also in the left corner causes all the windows to lose focus, until I go back there again, or choose my window again. With a true mouse, this happens infrequently, but with a touch pad and sliding of fingers, it happens too often.

In another area, Instead of zero seconds hover time, it would be great to have 1 second delay, and/or a mouse click to bypass the delay.
I am lucky I do not have Parkinson's disease. I feel sorry for any Gnome user who does have it.

There must be a reason why the list of applications was placed at the bottom of the favorites bar. I have a feeling all the changes for Gnome are to drive us to using XFCE, KDE, Mate, or any other clean interface. (grin)

GNOME is pretty focused on accessibility - check out the accessibility menu. So I would expect they'd consider your case of accidentally triggering the overview sympathetically, and might add an accessibility setting of some kind for it (I can't find one, so I'm assuming there isn't one already) - perhaps a way to set a delay for the overview trigger, so it only happens if you leave the cursor there for a second or two. File a bug report for it, as dbelton suggested.

I'm assuming you know already that when you *do* want to trigger the overview you can do it just by hitting the Super (start) key - no need to mouse to top left all the damn time.

[hadrons123]

Another week delay.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/18/Schedule

[mkruger]

While F18 brings lots of new and exciting things, the feature I will most look forward to is automated bug reporting. This will really help improve the quality of Fedora. After all, nothing worse than lots of choices for bug ridden applications. In this regards, commercial (and even most free) Win32 software really gives Linux a black eye.

[nonamedotc]

Well, it looks like I will reinstalling Fedora on my main laptop during Christmas break instead of during the busy end of the semester! ha ha!

[AdamW]

mkruger: we already have automated bug reporting in the last few Fedora releases, it's getting some improvements for F18, but it's already there. Whenever an app crashes you should get a notification from something called 'abrt', which can walk you through filing a bug report for the crash.

[mkruger]

Well.....walking through that bug reporting process has never been very intuitive for me. In fact I don't think I have ever been able to successuflly submit a bug report. So, I am hoping the process becomes easier.