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Multimedial

"Codec Buddy" is the Fedora Project's adaptation of the Codeina program which simplifies the installation of the free codecs for MP3 playback distributed by Fluendo.

MP3s are free– everything else comes at a cost

Fedora does not directly supply these codecs for MP3 support: The Fedora Project's aim is to supply a distribution consisting exclusively of open source software, so that private and corporate users can create their own distributions without having to enter into licence agreements with other companies. This, however, would be required if the codecs were integrated in the distribution, and Fedora informs users of this fact.

However, using Codec Buddy is not without controversy in the Fedora universe – some users and developers seem to fear that using it erodes Fedora's strict open source policy. Among the reasons for this is probably the fact that Codeina also offers commercial codecs.

Before Fedora allows users to install codecs via Codec Buddy it issues some advice

Seasoned Fedora users, however, are unlikely to pay much attention to Codec Buddy - ATrpms, Freshrpms and rpm.livna.org are RPM repositories for Fedora which offer easy installation of the software needed for playing back the popular audio and video formats via Yum.

However, these repositories need to be found first - OpenSuse offers users a list of repositories which can simply be activated at the click of a button; Ubuntu also gives easier access to what's needed. Fedora's complexity is unlikely to change in the future; Red Hat solicitors advising the Fedora Project made it clear only recently before the release of Fedora 8 that Fedora would only be allowed to advertise add-on package repositories for Fedora packages on web pages.

Although Freshrpms and rpm.livna.org were planned to be integrated with the games-oriented Dribble repository to form RPM Fusion in Fedora 8, this aim could not be achieved. The repository is now expected to gradually replace the three old repositories over the next few months; until then, the three will each offer their own RPM repositories for the new Fedora version.

Details

What we've discussed so far are the most outstanding innovations in the new version of Fedora. However, there are also numerous less obvious additional features; Bluetooth support, for example, was improved particularly in GNOME. The Pirut software installation program now also offers easy package repository administration. PolicyKit allows applications to request root privileges for certain tasks; Fedora now uses Rsyslog as a log daemon, and the program for implementing the firewall received a major update.

The firewall configuration tool received a major rework

In addition, several improvements to reduce power consumption and prolong battery life in notebooks were implemented. As an example, Fedora developers adjusted numerous applications so they don't wake up the CPU unnecessarily from energy saving mode after only a few milliseconds. In addition, the developers of Gnome Power Manager integrated white lists containing information about which notebooks need to receive which special treatment. Suspend to RAM (ACPI S3), for example, is now said to work directly on many devices, without having to try out various workarounds first. For systems with Nvidia graphics chips, however, Fedora developers deactivated S3 mode completely, since the Nv driver provided doesn't reinitialise the Nvidia graphics chips correctly on most systems.

For executing Java applications, Fedora has so far used the Classpath environment. In version 8, this task has been appointed to IcedTea – its developers took Sun's Java source published under GPL and merged it with Classpath components to rustle up a Java runtime environment which exclusively contains open source software. Such an environment is also planned for Sun's code in the future, but this will still require considerable developing effort.

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