Fedora 17 thread - Page 2

Robyn Bergeron has announced the release of Fedora 17, the latest stable version of the Red Hat-sponsored community distribution of Linux: "The 'Beefy Miracle' hath arrived. We believe this is the beefiest release ever - chock full of features to customize your experience to your tastes. On the desktop, GNOME 3.4 introduces new search capabilities in the activities overview, improved themes, and enhancements to the Documents and Contacts applications. A new application, GNOME-boxes, provides easy access to virtual machines. Additionally, GIMP 2.8 brings new improvements, such as single-window mode, layer groups, and on-canvas editing."

Originally Posted by waterhead

This secure boot issue may be blown way out of proportion. I say save the rants for when we have solid evidence. It's not like our ranting is going to suddenly change anything.

I also feel that the Novell/SuSE deal with microsoft was blown way out of proportion, and that was just an agreement of inter-operability. The secure boot thing is much more important. If it goes through, and you want to install Linux, you may HAVE to use a distro like Fedora.

Anyway, I may have to try Fedora 17 on my Samsung laptop. The last update to Fedora 16 broke many things. If Fedora 17 does not show any improvement, I will be forced to try a different distro anyway.

by Man On Pink Corner (1089867) on Thursday May 31, @05:46PM (#40173171)

No, this is a classic slippery slope. In the UEFI version that supports Windows 9, only secure boot is supported. You can't turn it off, but you can still enter a key manually when installing an Untrusted Non-Microsoft OS (UNMOS). The key is 256 characters long, and looks like a ROT13-encoded Perl script.

The version that supports Windows 10 also supports secure boot only, and still requires key entry. This time, though, UNMOSes are now called IOSes (Insecure Operating Systems.) They will run under a Microsoft-supplied hypervisor that includes mandatory hardware packet filtering.

And wait'll you see the third-party OS support strategy for PCs approved for Windows 11, code-named "Overton." The plan for Overton is that third-party OSes called PDOSes, or Potentially Defective Operating Systems, can still be run, but not on your local hardware. They will run only on cloud-hosted secure platforms over VNC.

All of this will happen because someone noticed that people will cheerfully bend over and accept restrictions in each generation that would not have been tolerated in the previous one. Evidence of this claim? Look at the history of Trusted Computing [wikipedia.org]. Starting with the innocent-sounding idea of TPMs with unique CPU ID stamps, which were fought heroically by users until the next season of American Idol came on and everybody kinda forgot about it, the people behind the curtain have gotten everything they wanted over time. All they had to do was demand a little more "compromise" than they could get at any one stage of development.

In short, everything old is new again. We are all IBM customers now.

by Man On Pink Corner (1089867) on Thursday May 31, @07:45PM (#40174437)

Sigh.

All we're saying is that it was considered a Pretty Good Thing when the mainframe era was brought down by the PC. Now, people like you are standing around cheering while the monster reassembles itself.

People older than you remember the way IBM dominated both the hardware and software sectors for many years. They held their customers hostage in every sense but the literal one. They used every technical and legal tool available to suppress third-party innovation. Eventually, people like Ross Perot, Jobs and Wozniak, and finally Bill Gates barged into the room and threw their proverbial hammers at the screen.

Fast forward to 2012. Steve Ballmer is pulling underhanded, abusive (crap) that would have earned him a fistbump from T. J. Watson. The rebels who once sponsored the '1984' commercial are now working feverishly to put the pieces of the telescreen back together... only this time, they're using Gorilla Glass.

Some of us are old enough to understand that this is not how things were supposed to go. If you're not so old or wise, that's fine... but by calling people who disagree with you "children," your post only shows your own lack of awareness and conscience.