With about two weeks for the final release I hear many talking about Leonidas. I hear ext4, faster boot speed, new volume control and a lot of things which I could not comprehend. So I read the Feature List page in the Fedora project wiki and decided to come up with features that one might want to look up before installing 11 on to the system. As usual I’ve been using 11 from beta stage and have update it all this while. It is stable, in fact I have not experienced any bugs . Talking of bugs, I hear they even have a new bug reporting system for the non geeks which will send reports automatically. Lets have a look at the features most prominently advertised first and then go to the less popular ones.
20 Second Startup: This says it all, but the 20 second start up is just to the login screen. But what it doesn’t say is the amazing way it boots up to the login screen. I have never seen this on any other distribution. It starts very smoothly giving the user a blue screen and it does not flicker a bit and smoothly changes to the login screen. My words don’t give it any justice, really the experience is as refined as a Mac OS X even better.
Ext4 file system and brtfs: There is a lot of noise about the Ext4 file system being the default not only in Fedora but also Ubuntu. So what’s the big deal about it. For the start ext4 can support disks of 1 exabyte and a single file can go upto 16 terabytes. On an ext3 the maximum disk size can be 16 TiB and the maximum file size 2 TiB and has a faster file system check so the server market should reap benefits from it. For the rest, we should notice generally better performance, and benefit from things like persistent preallocation when using updated torrent clients, etc. I have definitely seen a big difference in speed using a ext4 system. Brtfs may become the default file system for Fedora in a future release. It is the answer to ZFS in Solaris. It is definitely not suitable for day to day use but if you want to see the future file system add icantbelieveitsnotbtr at the installation prompt and you should be able to format your partition using brtfs. For more details about brtfs go to their wiki.
Volume Control: When I installed the beta looking at the feature list was impressed that I could connect my bluetooth head set and configure it with simplicity. But the installation didn’t get the job done. It detected my Jabra Headset, that is all. Then after a few updates, I was bowled!
All I had to do was pair it with my system and POP it shows up in the volume configuration. Simply brilliant. There are still a few bugs, like it detects it as a mono system but by the release day I’m sure it will be done or one will find a fix in the due course. The volume can be centrally managed here thanks to the pulse audio system. And if you do run into trouble setting your volume refer to my post on Volume / Sound problem in Fedora 11.
Firefox 3.5 & Thunderbird 3: I love Firefox but it loads pages slowly. It is annoying at times how slow it can be. Using my brother’s mac I saw the gulf yawning in between the speed of safari and firefox. I was planning to change to opera when along came 3.5. It has a new JavaScript engine and loads pages a lot more quickly than 3.0. It is actually impressive. You can expect your browsing a lot quicker. That’s something I like about Fedora. They bring the latest of the software in a release. You don’t have to wait for another release to get it into the main repository. Firefox 3, OpenOffice 3.0, Firefox 3.1, Gimp 2.6, all of them put into the appropriate release. For us who like to be in the bleeding edge of the software end, Fedora should be the choice. Thunderbird 3 is also included, not in the Live CD but you’ll find it in the repository. It also has a lot of improvement over 2 which you can find here.
GNOME 2.6 and KDE 4.2: Of course you get the latest of the desktop environments also. KDE 4.2 is something to look out for. They have done a lot of improvements and is finally worth using. The GNOME users may not experience much of new features but for the Volume control. They haven’t left out XFCE, fedora comes with the latest release, 4.6.
Presto: This is a plug-in for ‘yum’. It enables delta rpm support in Fedora. Delta rpm is an rpm file which stores the difference between versions of a package. For example updating the open office suite would nearly take a 100 M download, using deltarpms you can save more than 60 % that is you’d download only about 40M. It is not enabled by default so you will have to ‘yum’ it.yum install yum-presto
I installed the plugin and updated my system. Just see the output I got:yum update
Loaded plugins: presto, refresh-packagekit
[text omitted]
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