Semi-annual Fedora Fun
The Fedora Project (and for that matter Ubuntu) seem to have settled into semi-annual, roughly May (April) and November (October), release cycles, with Fedora 10 general availability just over two weeks ago. As usual I felt obligated to explore the new edition, and assuming it was acceptable, quickly put it into production.
Fedora 10 doesn’t feel much different to me than Fedora 9, as compared to the “feeling” of Fedora 9 vs. predecessors.
There are some installation differences, e.g., that the legacy “text mode” option is gone (and missed, by me) and that one has to append “askmethod” to the installation invocation to get to installation images on local drives/media. (And, that media effectively needs to appear as a mounted DVD.)
Network Manager still doesn’t seem to know how to properly configure static interfaces on my machines, but the same workarounds carry forward from Fedora 9 to 10.
The PackageKit update stuff seems to work OK from native X, which is an improvement, but not with VNC, so I’m still glad I’m used to using yum directly.
For that matter, VNC Server is no longer on the DVD, but easy enough to fetch from the network repository.
I’m running out of differences to remember to point out, so again, not a lot of differences. I see different GNOME bugs, some of which seem like they would be really annoying to casual users, but are easy to ignore.
Anyway, I’m now on Fedora 10 on both my externally facing server and my (mostly hidden from the outside) internal server, and it seems to do what I want. So I’m thankful to all of the folks who make Fedora.