The first alpha release of what will eventually become Fedora 16 has been released -I got my copy from here (update: that link is obviously now to the production release DVD of Fedora 16!).
The default artwork for the release (see left) is, to my eyes, frankly alarming -well, if not alarming exactly, at least not very good! It’s only a wallpaper change away, but I do wish Fedora would stop trying to theme their desktops to match their fairly arbitrary choice of version codename (in this case, Fedora 16 is codenamed Jules Verne, as in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Yeah, I think it’s a bad idea for a desktop theme, too!)
And I’m still not convinced by Gnome 3 (initial horror with Fedora 15′s implementation of it gave way several weeks ago to keen enthusiasm, but that has since been replaced by indifferent dislike… there’s nothing much I’ve seen in Fedora 16′s implementation that counts as a major improvement). Otherwise, there’s the usual software-stack updates (Firefox is at version 6, for example; and you get 3.4.2 of LibreOffice thrown in), but most of the changes are, I think, under-the-hood stuff and aren’t likely to revolutionise your Linux life!
I have successfully tested a Gladstone-prepared 11g Release 2 installation on the new release. There is the usual pile of software the OUI claims doesn’t exist (click Ignore All when prompted, because they do). There is also the expected ‘Error in invoking target agent nmhs of makefile ins_emagent.mk‘ problem during the linking phase. The workaround here is to run the fedora-linking-error-fix.sh script in your Desktop directory which Gladstone will have created for you (just navigate there with Nautilus and double-click the shell script when the linking error occurs, then click Retry in the Oracle Universal Installer. It’s plain sailing after that).
Interestingly, one of the reasonably significant changes made in this release (enough to get a mention in the release notes, anyway) is that, by default, a Desktop directory is no longer created for you during installation. However, Gladstone is hard-coded to write its fix-up script there, so a /home/<username>/Desktop directory needs to exist: create one before you start if you need to.
Of course, there can be no guarantees: what works in an alpha release might be broken by any subsequent beta, let alone the final, finished distro. But since it’s working right now, a revised, Fedora 16-aware, version of Gladstone is downloadable from the usual place.
Incidentally, I have not tested a 10gR2 installation on Fedora 16, and won’t be doing so. As was mentioned in various discussions on this blog lately, 10g Release 2 is out of mainstream Oracle support these days, and I don’t therefore propose to spend any more time on it from now on. So Gladstone may or may not work for 10g: feel free to give it a whirl, I guess.
