Fedora Core 4 first impressions

Installed Fedora Core 4 (test2) on my laptop yesterday to get with the times in terms of having an updated GNOME evironment and to see what the Fedora team had been up to. Mostly a pleasant suprise. The bugs I filed during Fedora 3 had mostly been merged, so that I had a correct monitor setting to choose from in the resolution capplet and my USB bluetooth mouse worked out of the box. Also turned out the driver for my wireless card is now included so I just needed to install the firmware rpm instead of the full kernel module.

Only negative thing so far is that the built in soundcard of my laptop do not seem to work with this new release. Filed a bugzilla entry yesterday for it so hopefully it will be resolved before Fedora 4 final version.

Apple and OpenAL

After seeing the story about Apple Tiger release I clicked in on the Core Audio link to learn a bit more about it. Working on GStreamer I have a general interest to see what Apple and others are doing in the area. Anyway one thing I noticed on the Core Audio website is that Apple is using and promoting the use of OpenAL as the sound architecture for games. This is great news (or maybe not news, just me be ingnorant on Apple stuff) as it means that game makers have even more API on common between Apple and Linux/BSD. The combination of OpenGL and OpenAL should make a port to Apple or Linux/BSD even simpler for developers after they have targeted one of the platforms.

USB Soundcard

I did try my USB soundcard on Fedora 4 last night and it worked as well as it did before on Fedora 3. Didn’ t get around to testing it hard, but it might seem like the bug causing the keyboard to stop working when unplugged is gone, but I didn’ t get around to testing it firmly enough to figure it out.

I have not decided yet how I want to try to set up my USB soundcard to make it practical to use. My current setup is a asound.conf file which I move away when not using the USB sound card, which is a rather sucky solution.

I guess the real solultion until a GNOME provided solution comes along is to have the USB soundcard set up as a second sound card and then I switch my applications over to it when its connected. Lots of manual work needed for that solution too, but still.