Fedora 19 Release Candidate 1 Is Ready

[RahulSundaram]

Thanks for the correction Rahul, perhaps that could be made more obvious in the mailing list announcement next time. I only found the link that I did by best guess and what 'looked right.'

The announcement deliberately doesn't link to the download files directly because you want to atleast read the relevant information first *before* you start downloading but I picked the download link directly from the first link in the announcement.

"As per the Fedora 19 schedule [1], Fedora 19 Final Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is now available for testing. Content information, including changes, can be found at https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/5623#comment:18 . Please see the following pages for download links (including delta ISOs) and testing instructions."

Go to the ticket and it's all right there.

[Ericg]

The announcement deliberately doesn't link to the download files directly because you want to atleast read the relevant information first *before* you start downloading but I picked the download link directly from the first link in the announcement.

"As per the Fedora 19 schedule [1], Fedora 19 Final Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is now available for testing. Content information, including changes, can be found at https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/5623#comment:18 . Please see the following pages for download links (including delta ISOs) and testing instructions."

Go to the ticket and it's all right there.

Yeah I saw the ticket, even went to it, I just didn't scroll down far enough to see the link to the DL folder

[bwat47]

Does anyone know if this incredibly annoying bug still exists in f19? https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=695030

Really annoyed me when I tried the beta, can't believe gnome keeps releasing with such severe bugs and then ignoring them. Not only does it randomly crash the shell, it can also totally crash gnome causing you to lose any work.

[RahulSundaram]

Yeah I saw the ticket, even went to it, I just didn't scroll down far enough to see the link to the DL folder

The pre-releases (other than alpha or beta) hasn't been widely announced before (and it seems this is the first time Phoronix picking it up) but be aware that the releases are not mirrored (do download only if you are actually testing it and providing your feedback to test list or filing bug reports) and new releases maybe published quite rapidly.

It's kind of important to follow the ticket rather than blindly download the releases and in this case, you will know that RC2 is coming out soon and you want to make sure the bugs fixed in between RC1 and RC2 don't affect you (say prevent you from installing it) and if it does, wait for that release and run the relevant tests in the wiki.

FWIW, in my experience Fedora 19 pre-releases have been in a much better shape than Fedora 18 in part because Anaconda has settled down after the major rewrite and is only getting incremental bug fixes and minor enhancements and there are no radical new changes in the Fedora 19 release itself other than regular updates like GNOME 3.8 and Java 8.

[RahulSundaram]

Does anyone know if this incredibly annoying bug still exists in f19? https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=695030

Really annoyed me when I tried the beta, can't believe gnome keeps releasing with such severe bugs and then ignoring them. Not only does it randomly crash the shell, it can also totally crash gnome causing you to lose any work.

I never had that issue with the beta or any release after that.

[Ericg]

I never had that issue with the beta or any release after that.

Yeah reading the comments on the report, that seems to be the case-- users can hit it just fine but no developer seems to be able to recreate it

[bwat47]

I never had that issue with the beta or any release after that.

I saw this issue in: Fedora 19 beta, Arch Linux with gnome 3.8, and Opensuse 12.3 with gnome 3.8 from gnome:stable, and it was very easy to reproduce on both of my laptops.

[AdamW]

Hum

Better clear up a few things here:

Michael, Fedora TCs and RCs are not 'public' pre-releases intended for wide distribution and publicity. They are validation test images built and tested as part of the process of releasing the three 'public' milestones per release: Alpha, Beta and Final. We'd appreciate it if you didn't 'announce' TC and RC builds, or at least did so in a low-key way which acknowledges the above.

Eric, the download links are left out of the announcement intentionally, for the above reason. We don't want the TC and RC builds to be treated as public pre-releases for general purpose use, they are intended specifically for validation testing. So we are trying to force people to read through the validation testing instructions before they find the images. This is why the links to the images are from the validation test pages, not directly from the announcement mails.

Also to Eric, F19 is not 'one month' behind schedule. It is currently one week behind. We slipped Alpha by one week, and Beta was not slipped at all. Final has not been slipped so far.

bwat, GNOME does not 'ignore' serious bugs. I mean, there are multiple comments from devs right there in the bug report you linked to. Fixing bugs is not always an immediately obvious, straightforward process. I've seen fixes for several GNOME crashers land in F19 in recent days, including one that went into TC6 as a freeze exception. FWIW, I don't recall seeing Shell crash for me a single time since Beta. Crashes are very dependent on your hardware, your GNOME configuration, and various other factors.

[Ericg]

Also to Eric, F19 is not 'one month' behind schedule. It is currently one week behind. We slipped Alpha by one week, and Beta was not slipped at all. Final has not been slipped so far.

See the post where I corrected myself, Adam

[bwat47]

Better clear up a few things here:

Michael, Fedora TCs and RCs are not 'public' pre-releases intended for wide distribution and publicity. They are validation test images built and tested as part of the process of releasing the three 'public' milestones per release: Alpha, Beta and Final. We'd appreciate it if you didn't 'announce' TC and RC builds, or at least did so in a low-key way which acknowledges the above.

Eric, the download links are left out of the announcement intentionally, for the above reason. We don't want the TC and RC builds to be treated as public pre-releases for general purpose use, they are intended specifically for validation testing. So we are trying to force people to read through the validation testing instructions before they find the images. This is why the links to the images are from the validation test pages, not directly from the announcement mails.

Also to Eric, F19 is not 'one month' behind schedule. It is currently one week behind. We slipped Alpha by one week, and Beta was not slipped at all. Final has not been slipped so far.

bwat, GNOME does not 'ignore' serious bugs. I mean, there are multiple comments from devs right there in the bug report you linked to. Fixing bugs is not always an immediately obvious, straightforward process. I've seen fixes for several GNOME crashers land in F19 in recent days, including one that went into TC6 as a freeze exception. FWIW, I don't recall seeing Shell crash for me a single time since Beta. Crashes are very dependent on your hardware, your GNOME configuration, and various other factors.

Considering I could reproduce the issue on a f19 beta liveusb (in addition to seeing it with gnome 3.8 on 3 different distros) it definitely isn't anything with my specific gnome configuration...And the comments on the report don't inficate it being hardware specific (comments from people with nvidia, amd, and intel hardware). Honestly I find it hard to believe that a shell developer can't reproduce it. I'll give the final a try when it comes out though to see if its still an issue.