Fedora 15 status and so on

So, how's that thar Fedora 15 going?

Pretty well, all things considered. We delayed the Beta by a week (adding to the one-week delay of Alpha to make a total delay so far of two weeks) due to the very late landing of NetworkManager 0.9, which was desired to make sure the GNOME 3 experience is complete (NM 0.9 is required for the 'native' Shell network status indicator/applet/thingy to work, without it you just get the old-style nm-applet). QA put our foot down and required a one week slip given how late this was in arriving, so now we have breathing room to get the Beta properly tested. If you're already following Fedora 15, please do install and test the Beta criteria. The Beta itself is due on 2011-04-19, so mark your calendars.

One thing I've found is that I'm liking GNOME 3 more and more recently. The polishing and tweaks that have landed in the last few weeks really seem to make a difference; with all the latest code and the new NetworkManager it feels like a very nice, put-together experience. Like someone said, it feels expensive. The dual-screen setup is handled a lot better now. I really like the finish the new default font (Cantarell) puts on things; it gives the desktop a recognizable 'face'. The slightly-hidden 'Power Off' option even gives you a 'Restart' button now (and there was much rejoicing). If you just sit back and enjoy the ride, it feels very shiny, and when you go back to a GNOME 2 desktop it looks a bit amateurish, to me anyway. There's still various bits missing that would make it a lot more awesome, which I hope will come in extensions and in 3.2 - I'd love for the Zeitgeist stuff to land and be really awesome - but I'm kinda enjoying it already.

A bit of news on my side projects. Poulsbo is not looking too healthy; I'm just getting immensely tired of that driver, and I did sell the Poulsbo system I had, so I really have no way to maintain it now. I might try and make sure it builds for F15, but that's about all.

There's some good news regarding Unity, though; the change to glew that I was waiting for arrived upstream, and ajax kindly let me patch it into the Fedora package, so once that update goes to stable, that roadblock is gone, and I can build nux, the last underpinning for the Unity stuff that I was waiting to get into place. Then I think I can actually build the Unity compiz plugin (which is all Unity really is, ultimately) and see if it flies. So that may actually go somewhere. Still no promises, though! Stay tuned.

Comments

Jaroslav Reznik wrote on 2011-03-29 08:51:
Hi Adam, speaking about Unity - have you considered utouch packages for Fedora? It's now hard dep for unity-qt...
adamw wrote on 2011-03-29 18:19:
No. I'm still not particularly interested in unity-qt. if you want to package that, it's your funeral. :)
Jaroslav Reznik wrote on 2011-03-30 07:58:
:)))) I'm not saying you should package it - /me is still trying - but for me it sounds uTouch is used in the old unity too... And it could be useful for Shell devels too as it's completely unusable on touch panels... You're right - I'm just scared to step into this area, hell is so close :)
[...] Fedora 15 status and so on One thing I’ve found is that I’m liking GNOME 3 more and more recently. [...]
kitgerrits wrote on 2011-04-04 06:34:
I'm looking forward to F15 already! That's too bad about Poulsbo... I was considering buying a new Asus 1201HA after my 1101HA got stolen, but I guess I had better avoid GMA500 altogether...