Fedora 26 Workstation.....
Jonni Bidwell splutters under pressure to make a hat-related anecdote worthy of this delightful distribution, which is now on version 26.
The bluest of distros makes Jonni Bidwell blush with embarrassment as he tries to summon a hat-based pun under pressure.
Good things are worth waiting for, and after a few delays the wait for Fedora 26 is finally over. It’s been about seven and a half months since the excellent Fedora 25 − time enough for lots of exciting developments in the Linux world. A slew of these have made it into this release: Kernel 4.11, systemd 233, GCC 7.1, OpenSSL 1.1, Gnome 3.24, LibreOffice 5.3… we could go on but lists and numbers do not a quality review make.
Fedora has a reputation as an excellent distro, but one more suited to intermediate rather than beginner users. Both of these are fair assessments. New Fedora releases are a great place to find new features and software without having to resort to PPAs, hand compilation or a rolling release distribution.
But while we’re all fond of shiny new things, be prepared to have to do some configuring yourself, and be mindful that there’s always a chance that things will break, and fixing them may be a more involved process. It may not though, and if you’ve built up some familiarity with the command line and know how to post useful requests for support, then this is a great release with which to level up your Linux-fu.
Somehow we failed to review Fedora 25. But that enabled us to test the upgrade path from Fedora 24 on our review machine, which was swift and seamless. The upgrade can be carried out directly from Gnomesoftware or via the command line using either the system-upgrade plugin or distrosync option of Fedora’s new package manager, DNF. We used systemupgrade mainly because we didn’t know about the native distrosync and found the process to be straightforward.
Packages galore
Packages are downloaded and then the system boots up to a barebones Systemd target where the upgrade happens. After a brief few seconds of delay the system dutifully rebooted into the new release. Running dnf autoremove removed a handful of leftover packages and, mysteriously, the lovely collection of wallpapers ( seethe screenshotbottomright). We reinstalled the latter as life’s too short for plain ( Evenblack?–Ed) desktops.
We also did a clean install on a Dell XPS13 9360, which availed us of the improvements to the Anaconda installer. The most visible of these is the new Blivet GUI for advanced partitioning. There’s long been a manual partitioning option in Fedora, but people desirous of, or already having, exotic setups (such as LVM atop RAID) tended to prefer to set things up beforehand. With Blivet, these users can specify their requirements, rather than having to second guess the manual partitioner, which concocts its own layout after being fed mount points and properties.
This is all very impressive, but most people will be happy with the Automatic partitioner, which offers you the choice to nix an entire drive or resize existing partitions to make space for Fedora. Sysadmins will be familiar with Fedora’s kickstart files for automating installations. These have been improved to offer greater control and can now take snapshots of the previous install.
Once installed we did encounter a disturbing and recurring message from
the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT) that the kernel had crashed. It clearly hadn’t because, but for this message, everything continued to work. A system update seemed to fix the issue, so we’re going to chalk this up to some obscure bug.
Gnome-ophilic users of Ubuntu 17.04 will already be familiar with Gnome 3.24. Users coming from Fedora 25 will appreciate its Night Light feature, for reducing eye-strain inducing blue light in the night hours. There are a couple of other nice additions, including built-in weather information ( ifyougo
outside–Ed) in the notifications area, and improvements to the media controls there. A number of online accounts are supported, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft. We were happy to see ownCloud support being renamed to Nextcloud, but sad to see that this integration didn’t work with our Nextcloud 12 instance, leaving us with the irksomely named but functional ownCloud desktop client to do our syncing for us.
Besides the standard Workstation edition, a number of editions (“labs” or “spins” in Red Hat parlance) are available. Some of these, such as the Plasma and Cinnamon spins and the Design and Security labs, have been around for a while. This iteration also sees an LXQt spin, which will be welcomed by users of older machines, or people that just despise desktop bloat. It provides a Breeze-themed, Qt5powered desktop, We also welcome the Python Classroom lab, which is part of the Fedora Loves Python initiative ( https://fedoralovespython.org). This lab includes multiple Python versions and the tox tool to assist switching between them. There’s also the Scientific Python stack, which includes Numpy, Scipy, matplotlib, the IPython shell and the Jupyter Notebook for webbased interactive worksheets.
Always room for Pi
Another edition worth mentioning is the Pi version. Readers might remember that when the Pi was released there was no Raspbian OS, and the recommended option was the Pi Remix of Fedora 14 ( www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RbWE6qF7pIM). Things have changed since then, and the original Pi is no longer supported, but this new edition for the Pi 2 and 3 offers a variety of desktops, a minimal version for use in IoT and hobby projects and a Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) version for children.
If you’re coming from an Ubuntubased distro, then be aware that Fedora idealogy is opposed to all things proprietary or otherwise non-free. So installing things like Steam, Spotify, Flash ( why?–Ed), the Nvidia driver and whathaveyou is more involved than ticking a box somewhere.
Be that as it may, the patents restricting MP3 in the US expired in November, and encoding and decoding this venerable format now works out of the box, despite the availability of other, technically superior formats. Thirdparty repos, such as RPMFusion and negativo.org enable the installation of proprietary gubbins, with the Nvidia package offered by the latter now supporting laptops with hybrid (Optimus) graphics arrangements.
Using the Nvidia driver should now be less of a headache with Fedora thanks to the new GLVND extension and improvements to the Prime layer in Mesa. It’s also worth noting that Spotify is now available as a Flatpak, so it can be installed with only a flatpak remoteadd and a flatpak install ( https:// blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2016/10/26/ distributing-spotify-as-a-flatpak).