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What's New in Fedora Core 5 Test2

After several weeks of delay, the second development release of Fedora Core 5 was finally made available on January 16th. This is a much anticipated version - not only will this be Fedora's first new release after switching to a longer, 9-month release cycle, it is likely that much of the distribution's current core will form the basis of the upcoming release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5. As such, Fedora 5 is expected to be well-tested and relatively bug-free, with fewer experimental features, but better stability and reliability. According to Fedora's release schedule, Test2 will be followed by Test3 in about a month's time before the final release on March 15th.

What's new in Fedora Core 5? Users performing a new installation will immediately notice that the Anaconda installer has been given a major interface overhaul. The informational pane on the left of the installation screens has been removed and many of the installation dialogs have been simplified, with more advanced options hidden behind an extra click. The screens providing partitioning and package selection dialogs have also been modified, while the option to set SELinux functionality has been moved into the post-installation setup. Personally, I can't say I like the changes. Anaconda, a de facto standard among Linux installers, has been barely touched for years, so why the sudden need for a major interface surgery?

The core system components have been upgraded. Test2 comes with kernel 2.6.15, a development release of glibc 2.4, as well as a CVS build of the yet-to-be released GCC 4.1. The upgrade to glibc 2.4 is particularly significant since Fedora Core 5 will be the first distribution shipping with the new major version of the GNU C library. Although it is still in heavy development, we know that the new glibc will no longer be compilable with GCC 3.x, it won't support LinuxThreads (only Native Posix Thread Library), and all non-desktop CPUs will be moved to an unsupported ports add-on. As for the GCC 4.1 series, one of the most important improvements in its code is the introduction of fstack-protector, a feature whose purpose is to assign a random and verifiable value to the stack of key functions. This feature will make it harder for remote attackers to exploit buffer overflows.

On the desktop, a current development release of GNOME 2.14, combined with a brand new desktop theme, wallpaper and screensaver, represent a major visual change from the previous test release. With GNOME 2.14, much effort has been focused on the Evolution mail client, which is undergoing subtle interface changes, including dialog simplification and general improvements in consistency and polish. There has been a lot of emphasis on reduction of load times and memory footprints of both the GNOME desktop and its applications. The users of GnomeMeeting and Eye Of GNOME will also notice substantial interface changes, while much of Gedit's code has been rewritten under a new Multiple Documentation Interface specification. The Nautilus search engine has also been enhanced. Coincidentally, GNOME 2.14 final is scheduled to be released on March 15, exactly the same day as Fedora Core 5 - a fact that will almost certainly give rise to a few heated debates on the Fedora mailing lists and forums.

As for the main applications, Firefox 1.5 and OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 feature prominently on the desktop, but other recent additions to Fedora Core, such as the Beagle desktop search tool (version 0.1.4), F-Spot photo manager (0.1.5) and Tomboy note-taking utility, are also being pushed under the spotlight. On the other hand, Mono, a software suite for developing .NET client and server applications and which was added to the Fedora tree only recently, is not even mentioned in the release announcement - despite the fact that its sudden presence in Fedora caused a stir on many Linux news sites just last week. Although Mono is now an integral part of Fedora Core, Red Hat has stated that the product, which is developed by Novell (Red Hat's main commercial competitor) will not be included in the next release of the company's enterprise range of products.

Another new piece of software in Fedora Core 5 is "Package Updater", or pup for short. This is an application with a very simple interface - it lists all available updates after checking with the main update server, and allows the user to receive the latest security and bug fixes. There is nothing else to it - no intuitive way to configure the location of the update server or to prevent certain applications from being replaced with newer versions. Following the installer, this is another area which the Fedora development team decided to simplify in order to appease the non-technical computer user and perhaps to reduce the cost of technical support further down the line. Of course, power users can still reach for the command line to run yum and customize the package update options, but those who are not prepared to read the man pages are now expected to use pup.

Overall, I found that using this test release of Fedora Core was mostly a positive experience. Although I disliked the simplification effort in the installer and some of the applications, if it proves to be a successful way of bringing more users and companies to Linux, then I am all for it. On the application side, I haven't had any major problems during the two days of testing, but some users on the Fedora test list reported crashes in Evolution and GNOME Terminal, as well as a non-operational Nautilus CD Burner. At one time, while running Beagle and pup, my system became unresponsive and had to be rebooted, but I wasn't able to reproduce this later. A large number of updates have appeared on the Fedora development server since the release so it is likely that some of these bugs are fixed already. A decent release overall, but it still needs a fair amount of testing before it can be declared stable.

Comments (7 posted)

New Releases

K/Ubuntu Flight CD 3

Flight CD 3, milestone CD images of K/Ubuntu's Dapper Drake release, are available for testing and bug busting. The Edubuntu release should be available soon. Click below for a list of notable changes in this release.

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Announcing Fedora Core 5 Test 2

The Fedora Project has announced the second release of the Fedora Core 5 development cycle, available for the i386, x86_64, and PPC/PPC64 architectures. Please note that Fedora Core 3 has now been transfered the the Fedora Legacy Project.

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Fedora-netdev FC4

The latest Fedora Core 4 netdev kernel, kernel-2.6.14-1.1656_FC4.netdev.8 is now available. Click below for a list of patches that have been applied to this kernel package.

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Novell Releases SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SP3 (ITJungle)

ITJungle covers the release of Service Pack 3 for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. "SLES 9 SP3 also has the AppArmor security program that Novell bought when it acquired Immunix, a provider of application security software for Linux, last May. SLES 9 SP3 has AppArmor woven in as well as Linux application security profiles for selected applications; the exact number was not revealed in the SP3 release notes. As the company revealed when it took the AppArmor product open source as an openSUSE project earlier this week, the full AppArmor code and a more complete set of application security profiles--some made by Novell, some made by application providers through the openSUSE community--are expected to be embedded into the future SLES 10 operating system, which is expected some time in May of this year."

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Distribution News

AGNULA loses its funding

The AGNULA project, whose goal is to put together a "reference multimedia distribution" based on Debian, has sent out a terse announcement saying that the Italian agency which has funded the project for the last few years has moved on to other things. As a result, AGNULA is now a 100% volunteer project. Projects like AGNULA are important - few people would say that the Linux multimedia experience is in no need of improvement. Hopefully they will be able to carry their work forward.

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Debian news

Watch for some major bug busting in the unstable tree. "This note is just some advance notice so that folks who don't want to risk any negative consequences, whatever they end up being, can ensure they don't have any RC bugs that are weeks old. Note that the RMs have declared it open season on NMUs, so do look at packages you care about even if you don't maintain them."

Here's a note about how the mirrors will be split. "First, the executive summary for mirror operators reading this: we'll be switching the primary mirror stuff for Debian to be for a small number of architectures rather than all of them; initially this will just be i386, but will probably expand to include amd64."

There are currently two proposals in discussion on debian-vote. This post contains links for those interested in keeping up with the discussion.

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Ubuntu Bugzilla to Malone (Launchpad) migration complete

Ubuntu has made a transition from Bugzilla to Launchpad's Malone bug tracker. All bugs are still available for browsing in Bugzilla, but logins are disabled.

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New Distributions

GParted LiveCD 0.1 (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop introduces the GParted LiveCD, a small, fast, Slackware-based live CD that syncs its releases with GParted.

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Weekly News

The Debian Weekly News for January 17, 2006 is out, with a look at a proposed a license sufficient for Debian and FreeBSD for the Internet Engineering Task Force that releases RFC documents, the availability of X.org packages for the Hurd, the status of the m68k port, splitting mirrors by port, new scripts to discover neglected packages, maintaining packages by a team, and several other topics.

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Fedora Projects Weekly Report

In an attempt to widen the communications channel, the Fedora Project has started a series of weekly reports; the January 16 edition is available now. It contains a terse summary of changes in rawhide, current known issues, and more.

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Fedora Weekly News Issue 29

The Fedora Weekly News covers Fedora Initiatives at LinuxWorld, Fedora Projects Weekly Report, Kadischi Screenshots in osdir.com, Mono and Fedora, Fedora Directory Server in Media, Fedora Rescue CD in Media, Thunderbird 1.5 Released, and other topics.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of January 16, 2006 is out. This edition covers new baselayout with improved runscripts, Portage changes USE flags default behavior, PPC development roadmap, AMD64 project update, and other topics.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 134

The DistroWatch Weekly for January 16, 2006 is out. "Several interesting announcements at last week's MacWorld provided fuel for many technology web sites, but an important question remained unanswered: will Linux run on the new MacBooks? Read on for an expert opinion. A rather quiet week on the Linux distribution front, but expect things to pick up shortly as the second test of Fedora Core 5 will be officially out today (Monday), while the first beta of SUSE Linux 10.1 should appear on mirrors later this week. Also in this issue: Fedora or Yellow Dog for your Mac, Xandros seeks beta testers, Debian terminology explained, news from the development of Dapper Drake, a new SUSE-based distribution for musicians, GParted Live CD for all your disk partitioning tasks, and a good round-up of popular Linux live CDs."

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Package updates

Fedora Core updates

Fedora Core 4 updates: system-config-bind (restore pre-FC5 pam configuration file), flex (bug fixes), alsa-lib (new ainit (0.7), fix for SW modems and root users), groff (bug fixes, spec cleanup), openoffice.org (rebuilt with alternative -mtune parameters for ix86), libwpd (update to latest libwpd), foomatic (fixes a conflict introduced by the HPLIP update, plus other additions and bug fixes), tcpdump (bug fix).

One last Fedora Core 3 update: tzdata (meta changes).

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Mandriva updates

Updates available for Mandriva Linux 2006.0: xorg-x11 (update to upstream 6.9.0 final), festival (rebuilt to prevent crashes), klamav (update to v0.32), OpenOffice.org (fix random crashes).

Updates for Mandriva Corporate Server 2.1: squid (new features).

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Slackware updates

The January 14 entry on the slackware-current changelog shows new linux-2.6.14.6 packages in testing, an upgrade to x11-6.9.0, and a few other changes.

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Trustix update

PostgreSQL has been updated for TSL 3.0 and 2.2, fixing various bugs.

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Linux Live CDs: All the Linux with None of the Commitment (informit.com)

Informit.com looks at some popular live Linux CD distributions. "Unfortunately, I can't cover everyone's favorite distro because I'd end up with a text book rather than an article, but I'll be looking at several popular distributions including SimplyMEPIS, SLAX, Damn Small Linux, Knoppix, and Puppy, and on the Mac side of things, Ubuntu. I'll also take a quick look at LG3D (Looking Glass 3D) and INSERT (Inside Security Rescue Toolkit). This should give you a good overview of just what's out there, as well as some of the cool things you can do with a live Linux CD."

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Distribution reviews

Review: Grafpup Linux live CD for graphic designers (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews Grafpup, a distribution for graphic designers. "Based on Puppy Linux, Grafpup is a small distribution despite its plethora of tools. Download the 75MB ISO and you'll be amazed at its speed and simplicity. When running from the live CD, Grafpup loads the entire operating system into your RAM, ensuring that the applications run instantly. The first time you run the live CD, Grafpup saves a file called "pup101" on your hard disk that contains settings for your keyboard layout, mouse type, and more, so that you don't need to configure your machine each time you boot. Every successive boot completes in less than 20 seconds."

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GhostWriter: A Linux distro for writers (Linux.com)

Linux.com reviews the GhostWriter LiveCD. "GhostWriter is a live CD that provides a small number of tools for writers of short stories, novels, and screenplays. But GhostWriter can be used by someone authoring works of non-fiction as well. It's easy to use and has a small footprint. In fact, there's nothing to install -- you run GhostWriter off a CD. Unlike some live CD distros, GhostWriter doesn't have install scripts that let you make it a desktop distribution, but [author Billy-Bob] Ming has hinted that a future version might come with such scripts."

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Review: FreeBSD 6.0 (NewsForge)

NewsForge reviews FreeBSD 6.0. "For software that's been around since the late '70s, before any of today's more popular operating systems, open source BSDs (in their current avatars) don't get their due share of hard disks. FreeBSD, one of the first BSD flavors to emerge from the 386BSD project, is a Unix-like free operating system based originally on the BSD branch of 386BSD and later 4.4BSD-Lite. This makes BSD's more like traditional Unixes than Linux. Late last year FreeBSD unleashed release 6.0, with better support for 64-bit and wireless hardware."

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