I finally decided to dump my Radeon HD2900 video card and X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card, because of the sorry state of the Linux support for them. It’s true that the situation with the Radeon drivers is constantly improving, thanks to the released documentation from AMD, but not as fast as I would have liked. Anyways I got myself a new GeForce 9600GT video card, which is known to be well supported by the free Nvidia nouveau driver and an Asus Xonar DX sound card, also known to be well supported under Linux thanks to the excellent Oxygen ALSA driver.
You might be wondering why I came to install Fedora 11 since I’ve only recently started enjoying an Ubuntu 9.04. Although I was very impressed by 9.04 I decided to try out Fedora 11, because of its much better integration with the nouveau driver(its the default driver for newer Nvidia cards) and the inclusion of ALSA 1.0.20 by default, which contains various improvements in oxygen since 1.0.18(the ALSA version bundled in Ubuntu 9.04). Fedora Core 2 was also the first Linux distribution I’ve ever used so it will always have a special place in my heart.
- Installation
I downloaded the Fedora 11 32bit edition DVD image and burned it. It booted into the familiar, nice looking and fairly intuitive Anaconda installer program, which we all know and love 
The installation went smoothly, nothing fancy about it. The only bothersome thing was the partitioning – although ext4 is the new default file system, it seems that grub cannot boot from ext4 filesystems. The workaround is pretty easy – simply create a small /boot partition to house the Linux images and bootloader files – a couple of hundred MB should be more than enough. I’ve selected for the installation most of the office and productivity tools, some development tools and a couple of database servers. Overall the package selection available with the DVD is excellent. The installation finished in about 15 minutes on my Pentium Dual Core @ 1.8 GHz wtih 4GB DDRII RAM and 500GB SATA2 HDD. Luckily for me Fedora installed a PAE(Physical Address Extension technology extends the address space of 32bit CPUs that support it to 36bits) enabled kernel automatically and I was able to enjoy the whole amount of memory. This was much better that what Ubuntu does(you have to install the server kernel if you want PAE support). The installer properly detected my Win XP installation on the same drive and set up a GRUB entry for it.
- First impressions
I rebooted my computer after the installation to find that not so much had changed since Fedora 10. The plymouth boot loader looked exactly the same, the initial GDM login screen and the GNOME theme are the same as well. The only difference in the artwork is the wallpaper. This is not an issue though – I personally find the Fedora 10 artwork very appealing. The boot time was more than that of 9.04, though not by much. The new unified volume control is simple, but functional. Though I personally hate PulseAudio and think it is one of the biggest errors in the Linux history it worked remarkably well on Fedora 11 with my new card. My biggest gripe with it being that it doesn’t support more than stereo output and that it’s so tightly integrated into the distribution that its removal is a rather complex process. All in all I doubt that there is a distribution on which PulseAudio works better than on Fedora. The nouveau driver worked pretty well and for now I plan to stick to it. Video playback with it(even HD) is pretty good, at least on my setup. The update manager had a minor facelift and looks pretty good as well. The addition of newer versions of software such as Firefox 3.5 and OpenOffice 3.1 deserves nothing, but praise. Overall my initial impressions of Fedora 11 were mostly positive.
- Post installation setup
Fedora bundles only free software by default, so you want in it stuff like proprietary audio/video codecs, flash, adobe reader, ati and nvidia binary drivers, sun java and so on. They are easily acquirable though. There are also things like setting up sudo, zsh, emacs… I recommend everyone to have a look at this excellent site I’ve been consulting for years. I want repeat what the guide states, but all you need to get Fedora 11 filled with all the goodies that you probably require is add the rpm fusion repository and issue a couple of yum install commands. I was a little disappointed to see that Fedora 11 does not have an Emacs 23 package, so I had to build it from source, but this probably want bother a lot of people.
- Conclusion
Fedora 11 is a solid release full of innovation. Yes, there are some rough edges in this release, but you get to use the newest and coolest technologies the open source world has offer. And you get to use some really nasty stuff like PulseAudio, but nobody is perfect 
I’d heartily recommend Fedora 11 to every casual Linux user and every professional as well, though I’d suggest total beginners to turn to Ubuntu 9.04 instead.
P.S. I did some tests with Fedora 11 on my ThinkPad T61 laptop and have a few things to report for laptop users. First of all the fingerprint reader support in Fedora 11 is simply fantastic. It is basically as good as the one you’ll find in Windows. In the past I’ve used the rather clumsy thinkfinger solution, but what the Fedora developers offers us now is light years ahead of the competition.
Second – the nouveau driver does not support suspend, so if you need suspend you’re out of luck – you need the proprietary binary driver from nvidia.
Third and last – I have no sound which is particularly strange since I had sound on the same laptop with Fedora 10. My sound chip gets detected. When I start some playback the app doing the playback shows in sound preferences, but there is no sound. I assume that maybe pulseaudio is incorrectly outputting to the digital out or something like that, but there are no settings I can change. The old sound settings panel had the option to configure such stuff.
July 5, 2009 at 2:38 pm |
Emacs 23 is in Fedora 12 FYI. So you will get it when it’s released. The irrational hatred of PulseAudio even when it is working seems amusing. Other than that, good review.
July 5, 2009 at 3:22 pm |
Heh, my hate for pulseaudio is not exactly irrational. Although it claimed in the beginning to seamlessly integrate with OSS and ALSA I’ve never got it working with OSS and distributions pushing PulseAudio are not making things easier. I have an expensive 5.1 surround system that I cannot properly use with PulseAudio, but works just fine with plain ALSA… There is also the question of added latencies from the yet another layer of abstraction. That said, I don’t think that PulseAudio is without benefits, but it simply is not ready for the prime time. The developers are pulling the same stunt as with KDE 4 – they released into production an incomplete product to speed up its development and get access to a huge tester base. Although this is not a completely bad approach, it should be easy in such situations to revert to using the old technology in case the new is causing too much problems.
July 5, 2009 at 7:42 pm |
Thanks for the report. And thanks for articulating my opinions better than I could myself! Though, in your followup post, you are a bit more restrained than I with regard to the release of software before it’s ready… it is a terrible approach that should be discouraged.
July 5, 2009 at 8:02 pm |
I myself am a software engineer so I try to see things from the perspective of the PulseAudio developers as well. There is a pretty good chance that their product will never mature(or will mature very slowly) if its not deployed to a large user base… You might be
familiar with situation surrounding OSS – it’s considered by most experts the best sound software architecture – clean API, professional touch, advanced features, but … next to none user base which effectively slows its development to a zero point… But anyways
developers should always mind their users and their needs if they want to build a successful business model around their products. And I think that most Linux vendors would not mind that…
July 6, 2009 at 12:33 am |
I’m right there with you; I just migrated to Fedora 11 as well. Good review, good OS.
July 6, 2009 at 6:29 am |
Sorry m8, but a detailed weather report takes more space that this. One can not review a distro like fedora with so little things to say. You have barely scratched the surface of the good that the distro has to offer but also the bugs included in F11. I myself consider both Fedora and Ubuntu the best there is out there.
July 7, 2009 at 6:47 pm |
i think that the use of delta rpms is also worth mentioning for f11. since it really significantly speed ups update time because does not require downloading the whole rpm every update! ^_^
July 20, 2009 at 7:52 am |
True – especially for users with slow internet connection. It’s not that important when you have bandwidth above 10Mbps…
September 4, 2009 at 6:13 pm |
I lay money the reason you not getting sound coming out is the volume is actually not up o your laptop speakers….. go into the volume control and set it up so you can adjust all of the possible volume controls… it was in advanced or some crap like that…. either way mine wouldnt work till i found the volume control for “surround speakers” when i put that volume up….. I had working audio
….. Fedora isnt the easiest system to get up and functional… But damnit …. Its the best when its running