The Fedora development branch got a set of new packages: NetworkManager was updated to a development snapshot of version 0.7, and KDE 4 base packages found their way into the repository.
NetworkManager 0.7
NetworkManager wasn’t updated to version 0.7 within the time frame of the feature freeze given by the release schedule. However, it was always promised as a feature for Fedora 8. So the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) made an exception and allowed to update the packages a week after the feature freeze.
I do like that exception since NetworkManager was reworked in many main areas for the 0.7 release: system wide configuration, multiple active devices, a new libnm_glib (the old one was a source of many, many problems with NM), usage of dhclient instead of dhcdbd (which kills hopefully another set of problems) and various smaller fixes.
It is not clear yet if the first two features will find their way into the 0.7 release which will be shipped with Fedora 8, but there is always hope. Once we have multiple active devices features like Internet Connection Sharing are not that far away hopefully.
KDE 4 development/runtime environment
While the inclusion of KDE 4 as the standard KDE desktop for Fedora didn’t work out Rex Dieter has announced that Fedora 8 wil be shipped with the necessary packages to run and develop KDE 4 applications. “Necessary” in this regards means:
all of kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase that doesn’t conflict with their kde3 counterparts
This is helful step for users to get a first glance at KDE 4 applications and will also help developers to develop new software for the KDE 4 desktop. I for myself hope that these pacakges will be extended over time to become an alternative desktop besides KDE 3 and GNOME in Fedora 8. It is also worth a try to add other KDE 4 packages over time.
Btw., other distributions are taking a similar approach: OpenSuse 10.3 will be shipped with some KDE 4 apps integrated into the usual KDE 3 desktop.
/home/liquidat 
This transition strategy of opensuse and fedora could be adopted by other distros as well, as it is a good idea. KDE 4 apps can then be packaged separately and installed by the user as they are required/needed, and by the time the KDE 4 desktop is solid, the users will be comfortable with the KDE 4 apps.
Cheers, and welcome to planetkde 🙂
Thanks – I’m just preparing my first post which will take another day since I have a visitor just right now 🙂
How i can use NM 0.7 with Gentoo? I really need it.
It’s just released as a preview version right now so you’ll have to ask someone who knoes his/her way around Gentoo to provide scripts.
the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) made an exception and allowed to update the packages a week after the feature freeze.
I do like that exception since NetworkManager was blah blah
I don’t like that exception, since, 2 days before the official release of F8, the new NetworkManager has lots of problems. Whereas before I could rely upon NM 0.6.5 to maintain a rock solid wireless connection and support WPA-PSK, it’s now horribly broken. WPA doesn’t seem to be supported well at all: the NM applet just fails to connect and repeatedly throws up a dialog asking for the WPA passphrase. The only recourse is to manually invoke wpa_supplicant to successfully connect to the access point. Now, on the same network and hardware where wireless connections were stable for days, the connection drops about every 5 minutes. Very disappointing regression. Maybe “ooh! shiny and new!” should be resisted by FESCo in the future. This was just too early.
tlt, I also see regressions when I want to connect to an enterprise WPA network: bug 366691.
Have you submitted a bug report? In case you didn’t, would you be ok with filling a bug report, maybe with my help?
But in general I agree with you, NM should have been regression free, and it looks like that there was just not enough testing 😦
liquidat,
The following seems to fit the symptoms I’m seeing, so didn’t feel another bug report was necessary:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=356041
I was waiting to see if the F8 release would cause the urgency to be elevated as more people noticed the same problem, but I’ve not noticed much discussion yet. I guess people are still getting F8 downloaded and installed.
The workaround that works for me is to create a local wpa_supplicant.conf with my secret in it, and manually run wpa_supplicant before initiating a connection with nm_applet. It’s terribly unstable though.
The other workaround that is more stable is to uninstall the FC8 NetworkManager and related packages and install the 0.6.5 version from an earlier test version of FC8. That at least gives a stable network connection and survives suspend/resume cycles.
Hm, strange. And if it works with NM 0.6.5 than it is just another regression. Sad, they should have given that one more testing 😦
Ah. People are starting to figure out the emperor has no clothes. This should be interesting. 🙂
(Hopefully this networking issue is resolved soon – I actually like Fedora).
Network manager is pretty badly broken for me too. Maybe its because I’m using KDE.
Question: Is the NetworkManager service supposed to run independently of the network service? (My understanding is that its supposed to run on top of it). If I run with networking on — it launches up dhclient, which never returns, and my machine can’t resolve any addresses. If I run with networking off, it just plain doesn’t work (and I can’t bring up wlan0 at all).
It really is a shame, because Werewolf was otherwise a very impressive release. Compiz-fusion worked almost right out of the box (it only needed a few tweaks), and I didn’t have to find and install wlan drivers for my T61p.
I’m having issues with NetworkManager as well, FC8 current,
kernel 2.6.23.1-49
NetworkManager-openvpn-0.7.0-2.svn3047.fc8
NetworkManager-vpnc-0.7.0-0.4.svn3030.fc8
NetworkManager-devel-0.7.0-0.5.svn3030.fc8
NetworkManager-glib-0.7.0-0.5.svn3030.fc8
NetworkManager-gnome-0.7.0-0.5.svn3030.fc8
NetworkManager-glib-devel-0.7.0-0.5.svn3030.fc8
NetworkManager-0.7.0-0.5.svn3030.fc8
This is running on an AMD Turion64-based laptop. I seem to have read that there are more issues with AMD64 than other processors.
For me, wireless works, but no WPA-PSK — just endless password dialogs.
More importantly, when attempting to create a VPN connection, I run into a UI bug in the OpenVPN create new VPN connection dialog. When I type
sorry, not used to this browser.
When I type either Connection name or gateway address, it takes, but then when I input the first letter into the other field, it crashes with a bug report.
Debug output deleted by liquidat
Saint Bob, please don’t post bug reports here. This is not the right place for reporting.
Please report the bug report to bugzilla.redhat.com. If you are not willing/able to fill a bug report there I can do that for you, but in such a case it is difficult to gather more information.
Saint Bob:
Is your wpa-psk network SSID hidden? I had a problem getting my wpa-psk to work until I started “showing” the SSID in the APs beacons.
i had the same problem, and i just updated vpn and vpnc:
yum update vpn*
yum update vpnc*
that should update any missing packages and solve your problem