My main interest in this release is seeing the LiveConnect work that I started in IcedTea finished and released. Deepak Bhole did an amazing job taking over where I left off — IcedTeaPlugin was prototype quality when I handed it over. He completed the major features and then polished the result into the robust plugin that appears in Fedora 10. Thank you Deepak!
Today, I had my first “Just Works” experience with the plugin when reading about Biosphere 2. The Cortado video player applet in that page first asked me if it could open a connection to upload.wikimedia.org and then played the video. Adjusting the PulseAudio Mixer volume control works for this applet, which may mean that IcedTeaPlugin is also using the PulseAudio backend written by my excellent interns, Ioana Ivan and Omair Majid. It’s nice to see that work released too!
In general Fedora 10 is nice. All the hardware on my HP Pavilion dv5t works fine, though the 3D graphics performance is not good. The graphical boot feature doesn’t seem to be enabled for my graphics card yet which is a little disappointing but booting does feel faster with this release.
I’m currently using swfdec 0.9.2 (built from source) as my Flash plugin. It’s getting there! The only thing preventing YouTube from working acceptably is the lack of support for the AAC audio codec. It’s nice to see progress on this very important component of the Free Software desktop!
I’ve also got Ekiga set up but I’ll have to convince some of my Skype-using friends to try it with me.
Looking forward to Fedora 11, I’m glad to see the volume control nightmare coming to an end and I’m super-excited about the Windows cross-compilation efforts. My wish list at this point is pretty short: kernel modesetting enabled for my graphics hardware, better 3D graphics performance, and to the Red Hat Java Team: try to get IcedTeaPlugin on the Fedora LiveCD!