Fedora, Mandriva delivering Linux goods

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

Full Profile

E-mail

Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux has a huge following among open source fans and it benefits from significant hype because of it. But Mandriva and Fedora Linux are quietly delivering the new features that Linux users are looking for.

Mandriva Linux, originally known as Mandrake, this week released a beta version of its upcoming 2010 release and it includes a couple of features that desktop users will enjoy.

First among these is the use of Plymouth, a Red Hat-created boot-up utility that adds a significant amount of polish to the startup process.

Historically Linux systems have suffered from text-only or very crude start up screens. Plymouth is Red Hat’s answer to giving users a more appealing startup.

Plymouth is a graphical application that runs very early in the boot process, even before the root filesystem is mounted, to provide graphical boot animations while the boot process happens in the background. Plymouth manages the boot-up process until the system’s X-server start up. The X-server then takes over to manage the rest of the graphics capabilities.

Adding Plymouth adds a level of polish to the Linux desktop that has been missing to date. Ubuntu Linux originally planned to include Plymouth in its 9.04 release but pushed this back to the 9.10 release. Now, however, the Ubuntu developers have decided to rather focus on faster boot times so Plymouth is not expected to be included in the October release.

Another feature included in Mandriva Linux 2010 beta that will please users is a completely rewritten version of NetProfile. This Mandriva-specific tool is an independent network profile management tool that stores information on various network settings (say between home and work) which can easily be switched between locations. NetProfile also makes it easy to move between machines by making it easy to migrate settings between computers.

Fedora

Not to be outdone Fedora Linux also released a new testing release this week. The Fedora 11 alpha release naturally includes Plymouth for better booting but also includes features for better virtualisation and mobile connections.

Fedora is the community version of Red Hat Linux, the largest Linux provider, and as such is regularly at the forefront of new developments.

With mobile computing now more prevalent than ever, Fedora Linux has boosted its mobile broadband support in this release. The improved NetworkManager makes it possible for users to scan for GSM networks as well as including a database of known mobile broadband providers. Using this database, most users can quickly set up a mobile Internet connection wherever they are.

Another area in which Fedora is pushing changes is in the increasingly popular virtualisation area. Red Hat has been a prime innovator in this area with its KVM, or kernel-based virtual machine, technology. KVM is a “bare-metal” virtual machine that runs as a kernel module, making it faster and more responsive than traditional virtualisation techniques.

With its alpha release Fedora’s KVM has a number of improvements that reduce memory consumption as well as adding network interface card hot-plugging capabilities. Most Linux distributions are now switching from the likes of Xen to KVM but as the prime innovator of KVM, Fedora has a good head start on most.

Fedora and Mandriva Linux discussion