Looking forward to Fedora 10

The Fedora 10 alpha release is now available. At this point, the next Fedora release (due at the end of October) should be mostly feature-complete, though the project reserves the right to continue development work through the beta release (currently planned for August 19). So this seems like a good opportunity to have a look at some of the features which can be expected in Fedora 10.

Rawhide users, who are well known for their masochistic tendencies, are already running the 2.6.27-rc kernels. Given that 2.6.27 should come out in the early part of October, chances are good that this is the kernel version which will come standard with Fedora 10. So Fedora users will be among the first to get enhanced webcam support, UBIFS, ftrace, multiqueue networking, and more.

Improved webcam support is an explicit goal for Fedora 10 in general. The kernel upgrade will help a lot in that regard, but Fedora is taking aim at another longstanding problem: quite a few video applications still use the Video4Linux1 API, despite the fact that said API has been deprecated for years. To help improve this situation, Hans de Goede has been working on another long-missing piece: a user-space library to make the Video4Linux2 API easier for applications to use. It will handle things like format conversions, which, by policy, are not allowed in the kernel; it also does better impedance matching between the V4L1 and V4L2 interfaces. The end result of this work will be better-working webcams for Fedora users - and for everybody else.

A similar objective for Fedora 10 is better support for remote controls. The LIRC remote control package has always been a some-assembly-required affair; Fedora developers are trying to improve this situation and get remote controls to just work.

"Just works," alas, is not a phrase which has been heard often enough around the PulseAudio sound server. The upcoming Fedora release will have a seriously rewritten PulseAudio; the biggest change is a shift to timer-based audio scheduling instead of the older interrupt-driven technique. The promised result will be glitch-free audio; those who are curious about the details of how this will work can find them on this page. PulseAudio is getting better.

Another big change, of course, is the shift to RPM 4.6 - the first real update to the RPM package manager in many years. Being fully aware of the consequences of a failed RPM upgrade, the Fedora developers are proceeding with great caution. The on-disk format will not be changed anytime soon, and newer RPM features are not, yet, being used in Fedora; that means that they can revert back to the older RPM if need be without leaving systems stranded. After some early glitches, RPM 4.6 would appear to be working fairly well, though, so this upgrade will probably stick.

Beyond that, Fedora users can expect a long list of new goodies. NetworkManager now has a feature allowing the sharing of network connections via wireless. There are plans to provide much-improved support of the Haskell programming language, though that project appears to be moving slowly. And there is an interesting new security audit tool intended to look for security problems and signs of intrusions. Your editor would have loved to try out this tool, but, as of this writing, the version in Rawhide appears to be lacking some fundamental features - like being able to start up successfully. Stay tuned.

One thing that apparently will not be in Fedora 10, despite the occasional user request, is KDE 3.5. Some KDE users are not, yet, happy with the state of development of KDE 4 and would like to have their old, familiar desktop back. This note from Fedora leader Paul Frields explains why KDE 3.5 will not be returning to Fedora. In summary: Fedora exists to push the leading edge, QT3 is no longer maintained, and shipping KDE 4 helps that platform improve more quickly. So KDE 3.5 will not be coming back - unless somebody else goes to the trouble of packaging and maintaining it.

All told, there is a lot of work going into this distribution release. The best way to really see what's going on - and to help the process - is, of course, to try out the alpha release and report any problems which result. After making good backups, of course.

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"the version in Rawhide appears to be lacking some fundamental features - like being able to
start up successfully."

Well, if my problem was the same as yours then this is now fixed. :-)

I really love the style of Mr. Corbet's writing.

...and that's the biggest reason I started subscribing. :-)

Yeah, Jon is the Robert A. Heinlein of general Linux and kernel development news.