releases

Fedora 16 : going back to KDE 4

If you follow my Twitter stream, by now you’d know that I’ve upgraded my laptop to the brand new and shining Fedora 16. In case you were wondering how it went, I’m happy to report that everything went smoothly. Even more smoothly than I’ve expected. Given my laptop’s weird wireless card, I always have this problem with kernel-kmod-something package not being available at the time of the distribution upgrade. That usually means that I lose wireless connectivity for a day or two after I upgrade. But not this time. Either the package was ready by the release date or the driver that I’m using is incorporated into the distribution itself. I don’t know, and, honestly, I don’t care. I’m just happy that it works right out of the box without any tweaks on my part.

I’ve upgraded from the DVD, since the torrent was the first downloadable option, before Fedora 16 was available via preupgrade. The process looks very familiar – boot from DVD, choose language, choose whether to install or upgrade and existing installation (that was my choice), and let it run for an hour or so, depending on how many packages you have installed and on how fast your DVD drive is.

On first boot, the biggest difference was the graphical login screen, which looks way better now. Logging into Gnome 3, I haven’t noticed much changes. Yes, there is an option to add your Google Account to online accounts now, which I did, but so far I don’t know what it does and why would you want to do that. I noticed that when I move to Activities and start typing, Gnome 3 searches not only through my installed applications, but also through my contacts. But that functionality is not of much use to me. After using Gnome 3 for about 30-40 minutes, I caught myself thinking that is is a bit faster, snappier if you will, than the previous version. Maybe that’s just me and the feeling of new, maybe it’s the forced reboot after the installation – again, I don’t know and I don’t really care.

Distribution upgrade is always a good time to change habits, so I decided to give KDE 4 another try. In the last 6 month or so I got somewhat used to Gnome 3, but it is still far away from being a productive system for me. I’ve just learned how to do things I need with it, but it still doesn’t feel right or gives me any pleasure. Hence, KDE. My last few tries, which were ranted about at length in this blog, gave me no pleasure either. This time, however, it looks different. Things just work the way I expect them to. All fonts – both for Qt and GTK applications – look good and uniform, icons are on the desktop, panel has shortcuts, the start menu is in place, and, oh boy how much I’ve missed you, the taskbar is there. I’ve almost forgot how awesome it is to see Skype icon with notifications of incoming chats without having to move your mouse to bottom right corner every time.

The performance of the KDE 4 is also much improved these days. It’s fast and responsive. And it can still remember my keyboard shortcuts configured ages ago. That’s mighty useful.

If you are still waiting for me to describe a problem or two that I experienced, then the only thing I can give you is this. Both Apache and MySQL service were down for some reason after upgrade. Restarting MySQL helped straight away, but Apache didn’t want to start. I had a much customized configuration that I have been dragging from place to place, so I decided to clean it up a bit. I disabled configurations for mod_perl, mod_python and a bunch of other features, leaving just the ones I actually need. Restarting the service helped this time, bringing everything back to normal.

So, there you go. In short, Fedora 16 is the next, improved and solid release for which we should thank all the Fedora community and everyone involved. Thanks guys, you are doing a heck of a job. Even with occasional hiccups here and there, I’m still much amazed as to how far you took this distribution in all these years. Kudos!

CakePHP 2.0 released!

I’ve been a bit all over the place these last few days, but I knew that this was coming shortly – CakePHP team released the new and much improved version 2.0 a couple of days ago. There are a lot of changes. And I do mean a lot. Here are some of my favorite:

PHP5 support. CakePHP was working with PHP before, of course. But in this release, support for PHP4 was dropped and all code has been updated to utilize PHP5 goodies.
Lazy class loading. Previous versions of CakePHP could easily get slow with a lot of models. There were solutions like Containable behavior and others. But it was annoying never the less. CakePHP 2.0 is much improved in this regard. It only loads things that are actually needed and used. That is a huge performance improvement.
Improved Console. The new Console is so much better that I’m even considering using CakePHP 2.0 for some of my non-web-based projects. It’s that good!
PHPUnit. Previous versions of CakePHP were using SimpleTest framework for unit tests. CakePHP 2.0 switched to the de facto standard PHPUnit. Tests are now easier to write. And integrating CakePHP projects with other Quality Assurance tools should be a breeze.

There are, of course, more changes. These are just the top few that I am particularly glad about.

Also, CakePHP 2.0 release is special to me. It’s been a long while since I participated in the development process of an Open Source project. I usually just report bugs and provide help via forums and blog posts. I did more than that with CakePHP 2.0. I actually wrote a couple of patches that were accepted and merged into this release. They were no rocket science, but a contribution nonetheless.

If you haven’t tried CakePHP before, now is the perfect time to do so. If you have tried older CakePHP versions, you’ll find this one to be much of an improvement. If you have tried it already, please share your thoughts in the comments. Let me know what you think of it.

Fedora 17 is a Beefy Miracle

The community has voted on the name for the next release of Fedora Linux. The name ‘Beefy Miracle‘ has won the voting race. It got most of the votes despite all the noise and protests from the ‘serious’ people. Personally, I am in favor of this name for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I don’t see Fedora as a ‘serious’ distribution. Not in the enterprise kind of way. It is a bleeding edge Open Source project which is supposed to be fun. And it is. So, nothing wrong with a funny name.

Secondly, for those who do promote Fedora in the enterprise environments, there is really no need to use the name. They can still reference the release by number. And Fedora Linux 17 sounds strict and official.

Thirdly, through the history of all Fedora releases, there were just a few names that I actually understood and could remember. ‘Beefy Miracle’ is easy to remember.

Fourthly, there were too much hype of different vegetarian cultures recently. I have nothing against that. But as a huge fan of meats, I’m glad to see any kind of meat promotion. Be that beefy or porky – I don’t mind at all.

Fifly, c’mon people – it’s just a name. It’s not a project or person name. It’s a release name. No matter what it is, in a year or so it will fade away. Like all the others did. Seriously, who can still remember Heidelberg, or Stentz, or even Laughlin?

Ubuntu naming permutations

Even though I don’t use Ubuntu myself, I think nothing stops me from sharing the fun those guys have these days. But first, if you are anything like me, you need a little bit of context. Here is a wiki page that explains Ubuntu code names and lists some of the previous ones:

The official name of an Ubuntu release is “Ubuntu X.YY” with X representing the year (minus 2000) and YY representing the month of eventual release within in that year. Ubuntu’s first release, made in 2004 October (10th month) was Ubuntu 4.10. Since the actual release date is not known until it’s ready and humans tend to prefer names rather than numbers, a set of codenames are used by developers and testers during the buildup to a release

[…]

The development codename of a release takes the form “Adjective Animal”. So for example: Warty Warthog (Ubuntu 4.10), Hoary Hedgehog (Ubuntu 5.04), Breezy Badger (Ubuntu 5.10), are the first three releases of Ubuntu. In general, people refer to the release using the adjective, like “warty” or “breezy”.

Well, now that we do have a context, here come the naming permutation from Mark Shuttleworth – a leader of the Ubuntu community. Choosing the release name is not easy, especially with the help of the dictionary and all those enthusiastic contributors. Read the whole thing to get a better idea.

The letter P is pretty perfect. It’s also plentiful – my inbox has been rather full of suggestions – and we have options ranging from pacific to purposeful, via puckish and prudent. We’ll steer clear of the posh and the poncey, much as some would revel in the Portentious Palomino or the Principled Paca, those aren’t the winning names. Having spent the last six months elucidating the meaning of “oneiric” I think it might also be worth skipping the parenthetical or paralogical options too; so sadly I had to exclude the Perspicacious Panda and Porangi Packhorse (though being an LTS, that Packhorse was a near thing).

Being generally of a cheerful nature, I thought we’d avoid the Predatory Panther and Primeval Possum. Neither sounds like great company for a seven year journey, really. Same goes for the Peccable Peccary, Pawky Python and Perfidious Puku. So many bullets to dodge round here!

Fedora 9 : before and after

I have recently upgraded my laptop to Fedora 9. Those of you who come often to this blog or follow me on Twitter, know that I’ve been waiting for this release like for nothing else. Two technologies in particular – KDE 4 and Firefox 3 – were the center of my focus. Of course, I could updated them separately and tried them earlier, but I wanted to follow the path of the distribution.

The upgrade itself went fast and easy. But starting with the first reboot, I was getting more and more negative towards the new release. While booting for the first time, I got two messages, notifying me that wpa_suppclient service and CUPS daemon failed to start. While I don’t care much about printers, wireless connectivity is vital for me, so that was a bit discouraging.

The login screen. It was changed quite a bit, and I didn’t like it much. Logging in. Somehow I ended up in Gnome, even though my desktop environment was KDE for the last 7 years or so. Logout. Switch into long awaited KDE 4. From the first look it was beautiful, even though not quite for my tastes. Surely, I’d need to reconfigure and change a few things. Not a problem for me at all – even more fun so.

Continue reading Fedora 9 : before and after