Fedora Linux

Fedora 18 features

Fedora Engineering Steering Committee has recently had a meeting where the upcoming Fedora 18 features were decided. Out of the whole list, I am actually really looking forward to just one – 256 color terminals:

Many terminal programs (like vim and ls for example) can take advantage of 256 color terminals, and all xterms I know of support at least 256 colors and sometimes more.
So let’s break through the artificial 8 color limit!

Also when preparing this page, while searching the net I noticed that Mac OS X Terminal’s default $TERM value is xterm-256color since Lion 10.7 That will ease some of the compatibility issues noted below.

You can see vim’s default appearance using the above expanded palette at:

http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/terminal_colours/#256

Sure, the upgraded Perl and Python, Samba4 and Active Directory integration, FedFs and even the MATE Desktop (based on Gnome 2.x) are all cool. But I don’t use any of them on a daily basis anymore. Most of my needs have moved beyond desktop and straight into the browser. But the colorful terminal still plays a major role in my daily routine, so I’m glad to see there will be an enhancement.

What’s your most expected feature?

I’ve been using a combination of ps and grep for y…

I’ve been using a combination of ps and grep for years now. Apparently, there is an easier way – pgrep and pkill utilities, which are a part of procps package on Fedora and CentOS distributions.

Linux distributions screenshot museum

Chris Haney has put together a simple application that allows one to browse through numerous Linux screenshots. More than 400 different Linux distributions are presented, with many of them featuring screenshots from different releases. This is interesting both in terms of how much a distribution has changed over time, and how one distribution compares to another.

I wish these were organized a bit differently, allowing more of a photo gallery experience. But I’m sure the improvements will come over time.

Via habrahabr.ru.

Fedora 18 : Spherical Cow

First, the source:

Thank you to everyone who participated in voting for the Fedora 18
release name. The name for Fedora 18, the follow-up to Beefy Miracle,
is:

      Spherical Cow

Voting period:  Friday 2012-04-20 00:00:00 to Friday 2012-04-27 00:00:00
Number of valid ballots cast:  429

That offset a lot of people, it seems. But personally I like it. I think it’s always a good idea not to take yourself too seriously.

SysVinit to Systemd migration

Fedora 16 finalized the migration of the system start-up from SysVinit to Systemd. The old commands still work, but as with any other new system, it is recommended that you get used to the new way of doing things. I suspect, eventually, the old commands will get dropped.

If you want to prepare yourself to that day, or if you are just curious about the new way of doing things, Fedora people created a wiki page for you, with a very handy table that shows the old service or chkconfig command, thew new systemctl alternative and a brief description.

I am all for new ways and better software, but on a personal level, I really like “service httpd stop” better than “systemctl stop httpd.service“.