announcements

Fedora 19 released

Fedora 19 has been released a few hours ago. This is one of the most interesting releases, feature-wise, for me personally. Have a look at the announcement, and scroll through the full list of features that made it through. Here is what I’m going to be looking at first thing tomorrow:

MATE Desktop 1.6. After numerous switches from Gnome to KDE and back, MATE is now my desktop of choice, both at work and home. Hopefully new version will fix a few minor glitches that I’ve noticed.
Developers Assistance. Not that I need it for my own projects, but it might be useful for bringing more standardization to the office.
PHP 5.5. The latest and the greatest version of the programming language I use on a daily basis.
Node.js and npm package manager. It’s been long overdue. Node.js is extremely popular these days and having it as part of the standard distribution is mighty useful. Finally, Fedora users can take advantage of all those numerous projects on GitHub without any additional installation headache.
BIND10. This has been a complete rewrite, and it now includes both DNS and DHCP. That’s interesting. And probably not too backward compatible. We’ll see.

Yet again huge thanks to everyone who made this release possible. You guys are awesome, no matter how much or how little ranting will come in the next few days.

GitHub : new look

GitHub blog announced a new look and navigation for the programmers’ best friend. Have a look at some of the screenshots, say “WOW!” and rush back to your repositories, looking for the magic “Enable Repository Next” button.

This being a big change and GitHub being such a crucial daily tool for so many people, the changes will be rolled out slowly. So you might need a bit of luck or time to see it right now. Gladly, my repositories do have the feature, and once switched to, they do look better. Navigation is simpler indeed, but will need a little getting used to, as I have it in the muscle memory by now. I also like a tiny bit of more color added, as the white and lightly not white were slightly disorienting after long coding and merging hours.

To the GitHub team: thank you guys, you are awesome! Please keep doing what you are doing – it’s obviously working.

1TB free Flickr storage

Gigaom reports:

“We want to make Flickr awesome again,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said.

Flickr is getting three big updates. All users will get 1 terabyte of photo storage for free. The site’s s interface is also being redesigned to focus on full-resolution photos — both in photo browsing and in search — rather than words and links. Users will be able to share the full-resolution photos by email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr.

This sounds amazing! Also:

Flickr Pro, which had allowed users to pay for more storage space, is going away. “There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore,” Mayer said (though she acknowledged that there are “different skill levels”). There are still a couple of paid options: Users can pay $49.99 a year for an ad-free interface, and can add a second terabyte of data for $499.99 per year. It’s unclear what will happen with existing Flickr Pro memberships that users have already paid for.

I’ve been a paying customer of Flickr for years. It was worth every penny. But, at the same time, it was difficult to convince my friends to use it as there were some severe limitations for free accounts. It’s nice to see them gone now.

The only weird bit of the blog post is this:

And, in addition to the iOS app Flickr launched last December, Yahoo is launching an Android app.

Flickr already has an Android app. So I’m assuming they will just revamp that as well.

Fedora 18

After a two month delay, Fedora 18 is finally here. So far, I have been surprised by two things:

Phasing out of “preupgrade” for “fedup“. Seriously? How’s “fedup –network 18” better than “preupgrade“? Especially, when dealing with desktop users…
How much new stuff I found in the Release Notes. I didn’t have much time to follow the development process last year, but even without that, I realized that a lot of my knowledge is quite outdated. Specifically: GRUB vs GRUB2 configuration, chkconfig/service vs. systemctl, date/hostname/etc migration to some*ctl scripts, network management (both with NetworkManager and with interface naming changes), and lots more.

And I haven’t even upgraded yet. I wonder what will come next.

P.S.: if you must know, I’ve written a huge rant on the whole Fedora direction, but after page 35 or so it got a little bit out of control, so I deleted it and left you with the above.

Linux kernel drops 386 support

Slashdot reports that Linux kernel won’t support 386 machines no more. This is more of a sentimental announcement for nostalgic reasons. The commentary is hilarious and insightful, as often with Slashdot.

Unfortunately there’s a nostalgic cost: your old original 386 DX33 system from early 1991 won’t be able to boot modern Linux kernels anymore. Sniff.

It’s been a long while sine I saw even a 486 machine. The last 386 I can remember is probably circa 1998 or so.