Countdown to Fedora 13

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage@peaknet.net>]

The Fedora development team is now on the home stretch. Barring any last
minute problems, you'll be able to download the general availability
release starting next Tuesday at 10:00am CDT.

I was a bit pessimistic in my early April prediction that F13 would have
GNOME v2.29. The beta and release candidate versions have v2.30 and it
appears quite stable. This is good because F14 will make the jump to
GNOME v3.0. That will support existing GNOME v2.x applications, but many
will be will be rebuilt using the new gtk3 toolkit.

All live images are back to 700MB. The development team apparently
reconsidered its plans to include OpenOffice and make the GNOME live
image ~1GB. Personally I think such legacy support is an unnecessary
concession for a forward-looking product like Fedora. I predict a lot of
Fedora users will soon learn how to build their own custom live images
for USB drives or DVDs
(https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_a_Live_CD).

The latest Openoffice.org v3.2 is getting as big as Microsoft Office,
but it's still FREE!! In fairness, a lot of that raw bulk is in its
dozens of internationalization support files. That list looks like the
United Nations membership roster. When installed with only American
English support it is still HUGE, and its components do take "a while"
to load.

Lastly, and possibly most trivially, in F13 I finally have 3D support
for my nVidia video simply by installing the
mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package. Together with the beta 64-bit
Flash package from Adobe's web site, this gives me *almost* all the
video capabilities offered by Windows 7. I say *almost* because there
are still several video formats -- notably .wmv and BluRay DVDs -- that
don't yet work even though I do have a BluRay DVD drive in my laptop
(doesn't everyone?).

--Doc



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