Fedora Linux

Fedora 16 will use Btrfs as default filesystem

At the June 8 meeting of the Fedora engineering steering committee (FESCo), the group decided that Fedora 16 will ship with Btrfs as its default filesystem. Btrfs is a relatively new copy-on-write filesystem with many interesting features such as read-only and writeable snapshots, multiple device support for RAID, online filesystem defragmentation, and more, though it is still marked as experimental in the kernel. “AGREED: Feature is approved. Will add some base critera to the page to be met by feature freeze. This is just a swap of ext4 to btrfs for default, not change of lvm or other parts of default.“

As noted in the comments, Btrfs is marked as an experimental feature in the kernel. As also noted in the comments, many other features which were marked as experimental were brought into production and that seemed to work fine.

While I personally have no knowledge of Btrfs stability or readiness for production, I am slightly worried by that move. First of all, ext4 – current default filesystem – works fine for me and for everyone I know. Why fixing something that works? It seems that Btrfs is a better choice for server platforms. And while Fedora is mostly used on the desktop, it is still a testing platform for Red Hat distribution which is, in fact, a server-oriented line of products.

On another note, Fedora 15 upgrade was a bumpy ride. Again, not just for me, but for everyone I know. Switch to Gnome3, sysctl, and other changes didn’t quite work out of the box for many people. Btrfs might do the same. I think it’s better to push such a change at least to Fedora 17. Let people recover slightly. Focus instead on fixing things which are broken. Let people regain confidence in Fedora distribution and its upgrade paths. Please.

Gnome3 Tutorial

Here is one solid piece of advice I can give you after spending way too much time tweaking Gnome 3 in the last few days: read this Gnome 3 tutorial. Don’t just scroll through it. Read every single word of it. It will save you a lot of time and hair pulling. I promise.

Xfce4 saves the day

After almost a full day of tweaking configurations and swearing at both Gnome3 and KDE4, I decided to follow my brother’s advice – try Xfce4. This is yet another desktop environment available in Fedora 15. I’ve heard a few good words about it, but never actually tried it out. Today was the day.

The first look around after a quick installation showed that most of the things I’ve been fighting with in Gnome3 and KDE4 just work. Xfce4 uses a lot of configuration from those other desktop environments, but somehow it actually understands what the user wanted to configure, even when neither Gnome or KDE do.

Xfce4 has a very simplistic tough to it. It feels at firs that something is missing. And maybe something is in fact missing. But after working with it for a couple of hours, I still didn’t realize what it is. Maybe it’s not as polished or as wow-ified as other desktop environments. But it works!

All I needed and wanted for my daily routine is there – desktop icons, panels with application shortcuts and widgets, keyboard switcher with flag icons, useful workspace switcher with application thumbnails and windows drag-n-drop support.

Even more surprising was the fact that Xfce4 picked up my font preferences. Gnome3 was configured with nice fonts. KDE4 was configured with nice, but other fonts. And they didn’t want to recognize each other’s font configurations. Xfce4 got with no effort on my part!

After losing almost a full day to configuration and tweaking I finally have a desktop environment which I can actually use. Hooray!

Fedora 15 : Gnome3, here we go again

As you probably know, Fedora 15 was released yesterday. I’ve been waiting for this release with a big worry in my heart. While I did, of course, want to have a look at the new service manager systemd and enjoy the power management improvements, I had my doubts about Gnome3. My doubts were based on two reasons.

Firstly, for the last decade or so, every major release of Gnome or KDE disrupts my workflow so much that I have no other option but to switch to an alternative desktop manager. When the new KDE comes out, I switch to Gnome and when the new Gnome comes out I’m going back to KDE. Not because I want to, but because there is a limit to how much I can take.

Secondly, because I’ve heard so much praise about Gnome3 and the new Gnome Shell, that I actually tried it out when it was in early beta. I was puzzled then and I hoped that something would be done about the migration process.

Don’t get me wrong, I like new software, new ideas, and new designs. But I also need to work. My daily routine doesn’t require much desktop usage – I spend most of my time in the browser and in the text editor – but I do rely on things to work. In particular, I need my shortcuts to work, I need my desktop icons to be where I left them, I need application shortcuts and system monitoring widgets.

Back when KDE4 was released, they decided to get rid of desktop icons. There was a way to add a folder view to the desktop and sort of have the same functionality, but it was too different for my tastes. Now, Gnome3 goes south too. After the upgrade to Fedora 15, Gnome3 kicks in, and all the icons from the desktop are gone. They are still in your Desktop folder, but they are not displayed on the desktop anymore. And I can’t seem to find a way to add them back. Also, all widgets and application shortcuts are gone from the panels. Yes, you can now switch and search and find applications, but it’s way longer than just clicking on an application shortcut in the top or bottom panel. As to the CPU, network, and other system monitoring gadgets, I can’t see away to add them back. And that brings me to the next point…

Migration path. It is a common practice in software design to guide the user through the interface when the user sees the interface for the first time. Especially when the user is used to seeing a totally different interface previously. A couple of arrows showing where things are would help a lot. A quick tour guide would be ideal. But none of that appeared in my fresh Gnome3 desktop. I somewhat figured out how to move around. But I am far away from being productive with this new interface. And even to get to where I am – I had to spend a couple of hours, given that I am also a technical person with some understanding of how desktops work and what they do. A though of upgrading my wife’s and my son’s computers sends shivers down my spine. It will be a disaster. I’m not comfortable with not upgrading them also, but I guess they’ll have to stay on Fedora 14 for now.

There is something else that bugs me quite a bit about these new changes. They seem to be fixing stuff which is not broken. I mean pretty much every desktop user out there is familiar with the desktop workspace, icons, shortcuts and main menu. Why change that? It does work! Are there things that don’t work? Well, since the beginning of times, people were complaining that you can’t change Gnome calendar display to show Monday as the start of the week (yeah, there is a way, which involves locale compilation and system-wide changes), and flag icons on the keyboard layout switch (there was a workaround for the older version of Gnome which I applied, but now the icons are gone again).

I do appreciate all the hard work all those brilliant people put into this new Fedora 15 and Gnome3 releases. Thank you all. I know, you worked hard. But the result is a devastating user experience, as it is now. And it doesn’t have to be. It’s like 99% of the work was done and only a tiny bit is missing. But without that one bit, the other 99% don’t make any sense. This is a great pity.

With that, I’ll spend another couple of hours trying to figure this Gnome3 thing out and if it won’t start working for me by some magic coincidence, I’ll have to switch to KDE. Again.

P.S.: As for the rest of the Fedora 15 release, it looks alright. I did lost my wireless connectivity on my home laptop, but that is probably because kmod-wl-something is not available for the new kernel or yum didn’t pick it up. I’ll stick a cable in it later today and will try to update. Hopefully it will work out.

P.P.S. : My brother pointed out to me that some of my problems can be fixed by installing gnome-tweak-tool and tweaking the configuration. At least I got my Desktop icons on the desktop now.

Screencasting in Linux

I came across an excellent tutorial on how to do screencasts in Linux. The original article is in Russian, so I just grabbed the important bits and translated them below.

Install screencast recording application. recordmydekstop is available via yum install recordmydesktop and comes with a simple and straight-forward interface for both KDE and Gnome.
Record a screencast.
If you want to edit the screencast (cut out mistakes, add music, etc), install a video editor. These came recommended: Pitivi, Kino, Kdenlive.
Edit your screencast.
Convert to AVI if needed (recommended before uploading to video hosting services, such as YouTube, as they don’t always work well with Ogg). ffmpeg -i screencast.ogv screencast.avi should do it. ffmpeg is also available in most distributions. You can play more with parameters, or prepare the video during the editing stage.
Upload the video and share.

This is the kind of a guide that I need once in a while, but which I can’t seem to find when I need it. Hopefully now that I have it blogged, it’ll come handy.