Fedora 13 (“Goddard”) has hit the streets.
Unfortunately for me, preupgrade FAIL. On top of that, I couldn’t even do an in-place upgrade from F12 to F13 with the physical media, thanks to the same strange error message I got with preupgrade that neither the internets nor the experts at Fedora’s IRC channel could help me with. In case you’re wondering, the error message stated that I needed to check (fsck) my Linux partition while booted into the Linux system (in this case, the existing F12) that is on that partition — Anyone who knows anything about fsck knows that that’s the classic Catch 22. Running fsck on that partition from my Ubuntu Live CD wouldn’t suffice. So I had to start anew.
F13′s improvements over F12 are mainly in the fit, finish and polish department. GOOG now has a repository for Chrome the browser, so that makes things a little easier. Things actually got a little screwed up in F12 after GOOG officially released Chrome for Linux, because uninstalling Chromium and installing official Chrome borked Flash and Java a bit, so I couldn’t use either plug-in in Chrome. But the Chrome I got from the official repository does automagically recognize both the 64-bit Flash in the Mozilla plug-in folder, and also Fedora’s open source (“OpenJDK”) implementation of Java, which is not only 64-bit right out of the box, but seems to work just as well as the official Java. So I’m not going to mess around with getting the official Java, the convoluted process I described in my post of six months ago after the release of F12.
The long and short of it is that, as before, I have 64-bit Firefox, Opera and Chrome using 64-bit Java and Flash under 64-bit Linux.
Ironically, the first news story I read on the web under F13 was about Arizona’s Attorney General :)
