November 2: Fedora Linux version 12 is due to come out on November 18, but I couldn’t wait to try it out and installed the yet beta version.

Improvements from Fedora 11 that I’ve noticed:

• The default video driver recognized my dual monitor setup and automatically gave me the correct screen resolution and spanning monitors.
• Gnome seems to run faster. Terminal now comes up instantaneously.
• Many of the applications appear to load faster.
• Pulse audio now works as it should without quirks. In Fedora 10-11 I could not use other audio applications when Firefox was accessing a flash media file.
• Mplayer plays my MP3 files without the irksome shuddering sound it used to have during the first couple seconds when playing the file. This was a problem in Fedora 10 and 11 but now seems fixed.
• Bluefish HTML editor doesn’t crash anymore when I do a spell check as it used to do in Fedora 10 and 11
• The new version of Dansguardian Internet content filter now runs. I couldn’t get the latest version to work in Fedora 11. Dansguardian has improved with options to weed out unwanted pop-ups and advertisements. Using the Fedora Linux – Firefox – Dansguardian combination gives me the safest browsing imaginable! Eat your heart out, Windows 7!

The downsides of upgrading to Fedora 12 beta:

• In the beginning Firefox crashed a couple of times. It seems to be stable now after a week.
• I can’t yet install the Nvidia video driver. But this only means I can’t run applications that take a lot of video power such as Google Earth. Video files play perfectly fine.
• Wine doesn’t run anymore. I have to wait for a Wine upgrade to fix a conflict with Pulse audio.

All of the above are fixed now after Fedora 12 came out with the final release, and also thanks to the good advice on Fedora Forum. I found a fix for Wine by installing the 64 bit version with the command:

yum install wine.i686 -y

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