Thursday, May 31, 2007

They made it... Moonshine

Fedora 7 was announced today, and it is really a pleasure to see they really managed to make it (somewhat) respecting the planned schedule.
I must admit I was a bit skeptical because the biggest planned feature, the merge of the former Core with Extras, was not effective one month ago, after F7 test4 already come out (note in the past there were only three test releases); look what Will Woods, Fedora QA leader, said in a post on fedora-test list:

So, Koji is our new build system, which we set up after F7t4. You can
check it out here:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji

(Yes, we replaced the entire build system for Fedora, just 3 weeks
before the release of F7. Yes, we are a little bit crazy. But we said we
would merge Core and Extras and get a release out by May 31 and by God,
we did.)

Monday, May 21, 2007

Making suspend (and hibernate) just work

Richard Hughes announced in fedora-devel-list a really interesting new feature will be included in the upcoming Fedora 7. Quoting from the mail:

New in Fedora 7 we have the new pm-utils and hal-info dmi based matching
of suspend quirks. We are doing finer matching to the laptop make and
model, to make suspend (and more importantly resume) work for more
people.

What this means:

* Some machines that suspended in FC6 might not work in F7
* Lots of machines that did not suspend in FC6 might work in F7

So, if you have to edit a file or add stuff to grub to get suspend
working in F7, that's a bug. This stuff should just work on the majority
or laptops.


So we now have all the pieces to get a realiable suspend/hibernate feature. What is still needed is a lot of contributors for new rules: if you feel like help ensuring your particular laptop can supend/hibernate (and even more importantly resume) properly, have a look at the linked site.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Finally some LIBERATION for fonts?

One of the most annoying things on Linux was the default set of fonts. More specifically, there was nothing comparable with the usual (and ubiquitus) fonts found on Windows like Arial, Times New Roman, etc.
Web pages, documents from MS office and everything polluted with those fonts were not properly rendering in the Linux applications.

Now, Red Hat decided to do something to fix this and released a first version of a set of fonts with the same metric, so that a replacementis perfectly usable.

For more info on the press release

Update:
the package review request was just completed. Expect to find them with a "yum install liberation-fonts" real soon now