Catching breath, no. 75.5.

Upgrade went smoothly, although I did run into this common bug at the very end of the process. Not only was the bug known about, it’s already been fixed, so no one should see it in the next test release. Nice work Anaconda guys!

The bug’s been written up on our “Common F13 bugs” page as well. That page is where we record issues that we’ve seen in the test release, to lower the surprise factor even for people who are gearing up to test our pre-release software. As we go through the release cycle and these bugs are stomped out, we edit this page as needed. Because it’s a wiki we invite our community to help us document problems there and track them throughout the release cycle — a great way to collaborate that can help innumerable other people helping to test Fedora.

Other than that issue — which itself required no mitigation on my part anyway — the update was extremely boring (just the way it should be). I’ve already noticed a few things worth calling out:

• The NVidia 8400M GS video card in my laptop supports 3D and compositing out of the box with the new nouveau driver and the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package. The compiz compositing manager seems to work fine, and although GNOME Shell is still in the process of being ported to the new Clutter toolkit version, I expect that will be giving me joy shortly too. I’m thrilled to see NVidia joining the advances made in the free ATI radeon driver in our last release just a few months ago. That’s walking the walk when it comes to free software!
• Mozilla Firefox 3.6.1 showed me a standard notification that I had some add-on updates available — integrated perfectly with my desktop. Unexpected and very cool!
• The new cursor theme has thicker action forms (or whatever it is you call the shapes into which it changes as you move it over actionable things), and makes it much easier to discern shapes and expected actions.

That’s just what I saw in the first few minutes. I’m really looking forward to seeing all the other excellent new features coming in Fedora 13. Our first pre-release, Fedora 13 Alpha, is due next Tuesday, March 9. If you’re a savvy Linux user who wants to see the latest and greatest new technologies, you can pick up a copy and help advance the future of free software by testing the pre-release and reporting bugs. The more we squash in the pre-release, the better the final Fedora 13 will be. With 0ur recent move to a special pre-release branch,

I’m expecting a very solid release — but nevertheless I am very much looking forward to exploring the nooks and crannies of Fedora 13 Alpha, especially if what I’m using now is any hint of what’s to come!