Fedora 11 "Leonidas" Ongoing Review

And It's Broken

Finally, after 2 weeks of delays (the original release date was for the 26th of May), Fedora 11 has dropped. Just after watching the latest WWDC keynote, waking up and downloading the latest release of my other favorite operating system should have been a great thing. But, unfortunately, it wasn't.

It's Half My Fault

Sort of... The thing is, the goals and principles of the Fedora Project are aligned with a genuinely free philosophy, preferring to keep all the little bits of the operating system as free and open as possible. Couple this with the excellence in engineering which comes from a substantial amount of contributions from Red Hat, and Fedora seems like the perfect distribution to use.

But, it's not. The principles of keeping proprietary software out of the operating system run diametrically opposite to the users' wishes. The end-user just wants their computer to function properly. While I must admit I prefer the notions nobility and principle, their evil-painted cousin practicality sometimes needs to take precedence.

My two computers on which I attempted to deploy Fedora 11 are my iMac and my MacBook Pro. Now, any seasoned Linux veteran and OS X user will probably now instantaneously guess what this post is about, and they would be right. Fedora 11 just doesn't have the flexible enough principles to incorporate the 'ugly' bits of code needed to run smoothly on such a 'different' architecture (mind you, Jaunty does).

So, it's kind of my fault in the sense that: A) I want to use a 'non-standard' platform; and B) The platform requires substantial non-free bits (which Fedora doesn't have).

The Problems So Far

Well, let's break them down into their respective categories (each is using the live CD for their architecture):

The iMac

Well, to begin, it boots fine (a little bit too much fragmentation on the CD, but otherwise OK). The GUI loads successfully, though why can't we just automatically login? The installer works well, selects the appropriate choices, and after some custom-partitioning from me (200 MB ext3 /boot ; 2048 MB swap ; 'the rest' GB ext4 /), we're off. It partitions the system, loads the live CD image onto the hard drive, and installs the bootloader. Then, we restart. However, someone decided that populating the screen with text which indicates where exactly the system is in its init cycle was too much of a bother, so now we just get a black screen for 5 or 6 seconds (not exactly helpful if you think there's been a problem). The CD gets ejected, and we're rebooting!

Refit does its job perfectly, and finds the newly-installed Linux partitions. And then...it can't boot from them. It just can't find what it's supposed to boot from. Keep in mind, this system has successfully booted all sorts of Linux distros in the past, all with roughly the same configuration, and this is the first time I've ever seen the "Insert system media and press any key" message pop-up. *sigh*.

The MacBook Pro

If you thought the iMac was bad, this is even worse: To put it as briefly as I can: It just doesn't boot. One time it showed the Fedora 11 non-Plymouth boot screen, the others it just couldn't boot. Oh well there.

This is Why I Have VMWare Fusion

So, it's fired up inside VMWare, and seems to be going OK. Boot times are noticeably faster (though it's a VM, and I have an SSD, so not by much versus Fedora 10). Yum still sucks at downloading packages, as it always seems to get either the slowest mirror (which uploads at a pitiful 13 KBps) or ones that just don't work at all. Everything else seems to be roughly the same, but I'll be updating this entry with more commentary the more I use it. I know there are a lot of extra features in Fedora 11, and I look forward to using all of them.

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Updates

Successfully installed Fedora 11 x86_64 on MacBook Pro, with NVIDIA drivers working. Restarting doesn't work (must use init 0); neither does wireless or sound (yet). Performance seems a tad bit slower than on the VM.

Ditto for the iMac. It turns out all you have to do is synchronize the MBR with the EFI partition tables, from right within REFIT. I'm not quite sure why, but oh well. The iMac, being the first iMac on Intel, has been out for a while now, and is really well supported by Fedora. The open-source AMD/ATI driver works nice, and provides AIGLX out-of-the-box, in addition to Plymouth (which could be prettier, but it's nice). NetworkManager is retarded, and doesn't turn on devices by default (why the hell not?). Everything else seems good...

Stay tuned...