Comments: IN DEPTH: Fedora 10 Preview

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi,

I just listened to the review at

http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZUm0A_jBwc

and wanted to offer some comments to help you folks understand the 
changes better.

Theme: Bryan didn't like the Nodoka changes (in particular the window 
border) but both of you liked the solar theme very much. Not much to add 
on Nodoka except that I am CC'ing the Martin Sourada, Nodoka theme 
developer if you want to have a more direction discussion.

Plymouth:  Fedora up until Fedora 9, included rhgb or Red Hat Graphical 
Boot. This has been replaced by Plymouth. You can find more information 
about this at

http://fedoramagazine.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/interview-fedora-10s-better-startup/
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=fedora_plymouth&num=1

The software itself is at

http://freedesktop.org/software/plymouth/releases/

The gist of it, is that instead of starting a complete X server early at 
bootup, we now use a related feature called "Kernel Mode Setting".

http://keithp.com/blogs/kernel-mode-drivers/

KMS requires extensive changes in X and Kernel that Red Hat is working 
on but this is not complete yet. For Fedora 10, only some ATI Radeon 
chipsets use KMS and get the new cool bootup shown at

http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=7p2x0g-Cuss

Intel originally had it but there is some major rewrite going on 
currently but it will likely be supported in an update. Similar 
situation for Nvidia as well. So for chipsets where KMS is not 
supported, we fallback to using a simple fade effect plugin.  My guess 
is that, Chris has a ATI card when testing the live CD while Bryan used 
a Nvidia card with the DVD installer and that resulted in differences in 
the bootup rather than the image itself.

While we will continue to offer the choice of a regular DVD installation 
image ( it is quite useful for redistribution and several other use 
cases), the current plan is to promote the live cd/ live usb more.  You 
can find a mockup at

http://duffy.fedorapeople.org/webdesign/get-fedora/

Installer: You remarked that the installer has not changing much. That 
is more or less true as far as the general interface is concerned but I 
would like to point out the integration of NetworkManager in Anaconda 
and some differences as a result of that

Also you don't have to manually enter a mirror anymore if you are doing 
a network installation. We use the same mirror list that yum itself uses.

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10preview/en_US/What_is_New_for_Installation_and_Live_Images.html#sn-Changes_in_Anaconda

PulseAudio glitch-free audio details is explained at

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/GlitchFreeAudio

Additional references on Fedora 10 changes:

http://jonrob.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/10-reasons-youll-love-fedora-10/
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/fedora-10-a-detailed-discussion-on-the-features/
http://www.linuxloop.com/news/2008/11/07/five-features-of-fedora-ten/

Rahul