Linux users have been waiting quite some time for Fedora 18. The final release has been postponed seven times, for a total of more than two months, from the originally planned release date of 6 November 2012 to the actual release on 15 January 2013.
No one can accuse the Fedora developers of being slaves to a calendar, or succumbing to pressure to ship a release before they believe it is really ready.
According to their public statements, the primary causes of the multiple delays were a rewrite of the anaconda installer and a new utility called fedup, which is a new Fedora upgrade utility.
With the arrival of fedup, all upgrade functionality has been removed from anaconda as well, which should make it considerably smaller and less complicated. I will include some notes and screen shots of the new anaconda later in this post.
One of the major new features in this release is support for UEFI Secure Boot.
I have installed this release on UEFI systems, with Secure Boot enabled and disabled, and on traditional BIOS systems as well, all with no problems.
My previous
two blog posts discuss
some of the issues of UEFI and Secure Boot installation, so I will not go into more detail on that here.
I have installed this release on pretty much every laptop, sub-laptop, netbook and desktop system I have around here, and had no trouble with any of them. All of the hardware was detected and supported out of the box, with no additional searching, compiling, downloading, installing or other special actions required.
That includes CPUs, graphic controllers with VGA, DVI, HDMI and laptop display connection (including the dual-display setup I have on my desk - Fedora is the only distribution I use that recognizes and configures dual monitors automatically), wired and wireless network controllers, audio input and output, and whatever else is around here.
A few other highlights of this release:
- Linux kernel 3.6.11 - This means it has a lot of new device drivers and hardware support. For example, this is one of the very few current Linux distributions which supports the Ralink 3290 WiFi adapter in my HP Pavilion dm1-4310 out of the box.
- X.org X Server 1.13.1 - Supports my various Intel and AMD/ATI Radeon graphic adapters with the FOSS radeon driver. I don't currently have anything with a nVidia adapter, so I can't comment on support for that.
- Gnome 3.6.2
- Firefox 18.0 - Keeping up with Firefox releases is not exactly easy any more. In fact, you have to install the latest updates after completing the base installation to get up to 18.0.
- LibreOffice 3.6.3.2 - Writer, Calc, Draw and Impress all included
- Shotwell 0.13.1 - Photo management
- Rhythmbox 2.98 - Audio player
- Totem 3.6.3 - Gnome movie player
As is normal with the Fedora distribution, there is no non-FOSS software included. The most notable example of this is that there is no Adobe Flash player included. An explanation of this, and instructions for downloading and installing the Adobe Flash Player for Fedora are on the Flash - Fedora Project web page.
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