I’ve been running Fedora 11 at home and work for a three days now, and I am very impressed. With Linux being a very mature product and Fedora releasing twice a year, an upgrade isn’t the radical experience it was nine or ten years ago, when Linux was raw and new. Nowadays each release is an incremental improvement.

There are new versions of the familiar apps: Open Office 3.1.0, Firefox 3.5, Gnome 2.26.1, GCC 4.4.0, Python 2.6, Gimp 2.6, Pidgin 2.5.5. Open Office can open those annoying .docx files. Gnome’s menus seem a bit tidier. PulseAudio is meant to be much better. Will hopefully solve my friends’ sound problems, but it was alright on my laptop before, so I haven’t noticed that difference.

Boot times are faster. The goal for Fedora 11 was to be at the login screen in 20 seconds. On my laptop it takes 30 seconds, but that’s still pretty good. My laptop is a Dell D620 with, I’m very happy to report, suspend and resume working perfectly on it. Also fixed on my laptop is an annoying problem Fedora 9 had with simulated middle mouse button clicks. Now either the top two or the bottom two touchpad buttons can be used. Power usage is meant to be optimised, haven’t tested if this means I get an extended battery life yet.

The kernel installed is 2.6.29.4. This is a bit of a problem at work, as VMware-Player can’t build modules to run against this version. Ubuntu, openSuse and Gentoo users have also hit this problem. There are long, complicated, discussion forum threads with different patches which claim to fix things, but don’t work for me. Eventually VMware will catch up and release a new version of VMware-Player which will work with the 2.6.29 kernel. It’s a pain to wait, but that’s what you get with kernel code which doesn’t live with the rest of code in the kernel source tree.

Fedora 11 has the new ext4 filesystem format as default. This should make file access faster. I was working on ext4 support at my previous job for their product. I’m a bit surprised the Fedora installer (Anaconda) won’t allow the root filesystem to be ext4. ext4 can support a mix of on-disk structures (pind/dind/tind blocks or extents) and I thought this allowed Grub to still boot from it. Oh well, ext3 will do for /boot until Grub2 is finished (or the world ends, whichever comes first).

Lastly the fonts look fantastic. I’m not sure exactly what has changed there. Fedora has had nice fonts for a while, but text is looking very smooth these days. Though I did have problems with DDD (the GDB debugger front end). The DDD user interface hasn’t changed much for many many years and obviously can’t use the new fonts. It was displaying very large ugly letters, so I installed a bunch of the old font packages like xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi. That’s fixed DDD so it is at least acceptable to work with.

I’m pretty pleased with how the upgrade has gone. All up Fedora 11 seems a bit faster, more polished and nice and stable. I recommend giving it a try.

Fedora 9 is due for release on April 29.

This will be the first major distro with ext4 as a first class filesystem (i.e. with tools support). Ext4 will not be the default filesystem, that will still be ext3.

Here’s a interview with EricSandeen about this.  Interesting that there will be a defrag utitility for ext4.

LVM has the cool feature that you can create a snapshot of a logical volume which captures a copy of the volume at that moment in time. This can then be backed up without worrying about the volume changing or being locked while it is being read.
modprobe dm-storage
lvcreate -s -L 100k -n snapped /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
The problem is the snapshot needs free space on the disk (in the LVM volume group) and normally all of this is already allocated to the existing volumes. This gives a ” Insufficient free extents (0) in volume group VolGroup00: 1 required” error message. Robert had the clever idea of using a ramdisk as a temporary place to store the snapshot. Fedora boots with 16 x 16M ramdisks enabled, so this works.
pvcreate /dev/ram1
vgextend VolGroup00 /dev/ram1
lvcreate -s -L 100k -n snapped /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
A snapshot without touching the disk! Very clever.

When finished with it, just remember to clean up
lvremove /dev/VolGroup00/snapped
vgreduce VolGroup00 /dev/ram1

Had a green curry at Wok’n'Noodle with Tim, before helping him with the set up of his blog “Scratch my tummy“.

I’m sitting up the back of the Fedora Miniconf where I have access to power and the wireless. Net has been problematic, but hopefully is much better now. We are a mixture of sysadmins, developers, integrators and students. Quite a few from Red Hat (from many different locations).

It is interesting spying on what laptops are being used. Not so many MacBooks as LCA2006. Spotted a couple of EeePCs, an OLPC XO and a N800, then there’s the Dells and Lenovos and MacBooks.

Rough notes dumped onto the wiki.

Topics covered:

• Creating RPMs — Richard Keech, Red Hat
• Migrating to Fedora Directory Service — Del Elson, Babel
• The kernel in Fedora — Dave Jones, Red Hat
• SystemTap — Eugene Teo, Red Hat
• Samba and LDAP using FDS — Del Elson, Babel
• Fedora Internationalization — Jens Petersen, Red Hat
• Provisioning RHEL and Fedora — Richard Keech, Red Hat

A key work-related factoid from Dave Jone’s talk is the on-disk structure for Ext4 is not yet locked down, but will be in the 2.6.25 kernel. 2.6.25 should be released in April. Fedora 9 will pick it up before its release in May even though this is quite late in the release cycle. I’m not sure if that means ext4 will be available in Fedora 9 as Dave said he was wanting to see the -devel designation dropped from the module first.

Caught up with Tim at Wok’n'Noodle. Had the always delicious Thai Style Vegetarian Noodles. (With tofu, cabbage, carrot, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, bok choi and spring onion).

Tim has been looking at setting up a website. I’ve sold him on how cool SliceHost is. Yes it is more expensive than just a virtual domain, but it is great to have complete control over the whole operating system, and good learning too.

I’ve done my bit for the Fedora project too. Tim is also going to run Fedora 8 as well, that way we are both talking the same language (rpm, yum, service, /etc/sysconfig).

I demo’ed the SliceManager and answered how to do a few things with yum.
Q: How do you update the distro with yum?
A: “yum update”

Q: How do you search for a package with yum?
A: “yum search packagename”

Q: How do you see all the packages which are installed?
A: “rpm -qa”

Q: How do you see all the files which were installed with a package?
A: “rpm -qil packagename”

I think he’ll find it very easy.

I gave him a couple of hints about how I secure my systems too, but I don’t think I’ll blog those .