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News and Editorials

Fedora Core 3 and the community

According to the Fedora web site:

The "about" page adds this:

In this context, it is interesting to consider the Fedora Core 3 plan, which was posted on July 2. The plan calls for all kinds of interesting things, including:

• GCC 3.4 as the standard compiler.
• GNOME 2.8 - which is not yet released.
• KDE 3.3.
• Evolution 2.0
• Another attempt at SELinux, with a less ambitious, less intrusive set of policies.
• Indic language support

And a lot more. It looks like a bunch of good stuff.

One should note, though, that the scheduled date for the first test release is July 12 - ten days after the announcement. Before the plan announcement, there was very little public discussion of what FC3 was going to contain. At this point, there is not a whole lot of time to "include external developers in the process of making technical decisions." Instead, it looks much like, once again, the core decisions have emerged in final form from a smoke-filled room at Red Hat headquarters.

Let there be no mistake: Fedora Core is an unmitigated good thing. Red Hat is giving the world a high-quality distribution with (mostly) highly current software and a certain degree of visibility into the development process. One should not complain about such a gift; we are certainly richer as a result of it.

But Fedora clearly is not meeting its stated goals of being a community project, and, apparently, it is not even making much progress in that direction. Red Hat would do well to clarify its plans for Fedora at this point. If Fedora is to be a community project, interested developers need to see some progress in that direction. Opening up the promised CVS server would be a good start. Another promise that would be good to keep is this one:

The FC3 plan was clearly not developed in this way. The formation of the promised technical committee, which is supposed to include outside members, would also be a good step.

If, instead, Red Hat plans to keep Fedora in its current form (essentially, a development and testing platform for technologies eventually slated for the enterprise products), it should say so. Red Hat would be entitled to take this position, and, certainly, large numbers of users are content to run a Fedora distribution which is developed in this way. Who can complain? It is a free, high-quality distribution with good security support. But outside developers who would like to participate in its creation have a right to know whether (and when) that will be possible.

Comments (2 posted)

Distribution News

Conectiva Linux 10 released

Conectiva Linux 10 is out; this release includes the 2.6 kernel, additional spam-fighting software, Samba 3, the latest KDE and GNOME, Conectiva Office (OpenOffice.org with a Portuguese translation), and lots of other goodies. Click below for details and download coordinates.

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Which Linux distribution is the most powerful? (linux-elitists)

Mr. Bad asks (on linux-elitists), which distribution is the most powerful? "So, after seeing the umpteenth Debian package description mentioning what a powerful throbbing ur-package is barely contained within the bulging envelope of this particular .deb, I started wondering: how much of the software in Debian is actually POWERFUL? Like, so notably powerful that that's how you'd describe the software; it impresses its powerful powerness on the maintainer that much that they can't help mentioning its power."

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Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News July 6, 2004 is available with news about a Debian Trivia Quiz, GNOME 2.6 in testing, the future of Debian's X11 packages, and several other topics.

An unofficial announcement has gone out: the Debian Project has voted to postpone its recent social contract changes until after the next major release ("Sarge") goes out. The changes in question force the removal of all documentation, data, and other materials seen by Debian as not being free; they had threatened to delay the (already tardy) Sarge release. This vote should pave the way for a faster release. Note that the project adopted the resolution wording which defers the changes indefinitely, rather than the version which put a September deadline on the release. The full results are available for the curious; the full text of the several variants of the resolution is available over here. The announcement from the project Secretary is here.

Chris Cheney reports that the Debian AMD64 port is the second most complete port behind i386. Chris's post contains more details about the status of this port.

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Libranet 2.8.1 trial download

LibraNet GNU/Linux is offering free trial downloads.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter - Volume 3, Issue 27

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of July 5, 2004 is out. This week's edition has an announcement for the Gentoo web redesign contest, among other topics.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 56

The DistroWatch Weekly for July 5, 2004 is out with an up-to-date look at new and updated distributions.

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Fedora

The Fedora Core 3 announcement lists plans for this release which include integrating GCC 3.4, GNOME 2.8, KDE 3.3, another (less ambitious) attempt at SELinux, Indic language support, VNC, etc.

Fedora Core 2 has updates for GConf2 (fixes a problem when using merged files) and xorg-x11 (new release with minor enhancements to the package upgrade process).

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Mandrakelinux

Mandrakelinux has an updated autofs package that fixes a stalling problem in Corporate Server 2.1/x86_64.

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New Distributions

Resala Linux

The Resala Linux Project is a single CD distribution based on the Fedora Core Project. Its main objectives are: to make an Arabic ready distribution, make it easy for normal users to use Linux in Arabic speaking countries, open the doors for Arabic developers to participate positively in the OSS, to be a test bed for Arabic application and introduce these applications to other main stream distributions. Resala Linux Core 1 was released June 21, 2004.

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Minor distribution updates

Astaro Security Linux

Astaro Security Linux has released v5.013 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: This Up2Date adds possibility to fetch Up2Dates via proxy, improves the downloader and spamscore capabilities for the Contentfilter, improves the POP3 Extensionfilter and fixes the Openswan vulnerability CAN-2004-0590 besides a list of fixes for other small problems."

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Deep-Water/Linux

Deep-Water/Linux has released v0.4.0 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This release replaces the GUI, adds a new file browser, and updates to a newer kernel."

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Feather Linux

Feather Linux has released v0.5.3 with lots of bug fixes. From the changelog:
- Fixed multiple fpkg "Additions" menu creation
- Fixed HD install script
- Fixed XFCE script, and edited it so that it requires less memory
- Changed Fluxbox menu text size to 12
- Changed some wording of the X setup script and mount.app.
- Downgraded Firefox to 0.8 because of dependencies

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LEAF

LEAF (Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall) has released Bering-uClibc 2.1.3 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: Maintenance release for the stable 2.1 series."

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LormaLINUX

LormaLINUX has released v5 RC2. "his release of LormaLinux makes sure that all packages are clean and have all the dependencies covered. Replaced Xpdf with Acroread (Adobe Acrobat Reader) that works with Firefox enabling you to view and copy content of a PDF file right on your browser. Added the latest version of wine (a Windows emulator) for your extreme cross-platform gaming pleasure."

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Onebase Linux

Onebase Linux has released OnebaseGo v2.0 with numerous package updates, improved EPS and Docking. Onebase 2004r4 has also been released.

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tinysofa

tinysofa has released v2.0-pre2 (Persistence). "The C#/ASP.NET suite has been updated to 1.0. vsftpd is now at 2.0.1 and includes SSL/TLS support. Apache version 2.0.50 brings forth many feature enhancements and bug fixes. The slony1 replication engine for PostgreSQL also features in pre2, with version 1.0.0 being included in the distribution. Additionally, ruby is now included in the distribution."

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Distribution reviews

Fedora Core 2: Making it work (linux.com)

This linux.com author examines Fedora Core 2 on his production system. "Getting FC2 to a state of desktop readiness is a task that requires a medium amount of skill and will probably take close to a full day for the first workstation (assuming that you have a high-speed Internet connection). Subsequent installs should go more quickly; indeed, I intend for my students to get most of it done during their first three-hour class."

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The Stealth Desktop Part I (OfB.biz)

Open for Business advocates Slackware for the desktop. "The installation and initial setup is to be done by someone with more experience with computers. This is consistent with widespread practice. As I said before, end users installing their own operating systems are an exception, and not the norm, in almost every OS under the sun. Therefore, the install and initial setup should be performed by the "resident nerd" of the office or home, or by an otherwise qualified person."

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OpenBSD - For Your Eyes Only (DistroWatch)

DistroWatch reviews OpenBSD. "Devout cynics will claim that a "secure network operating system" is an oxymoron. No matter how good you make it, somebody will find a way to break it. Nevertheless, the OpenBSD developers can claim (with considerable justification) that they've worked harder and longer than anyone else to make sure that their OS is secure. The record speaks for itself - in the nearly nine years of OpenBSD's existence, only one remote security hole in the default install has been discovered (and that hole was immediately closed)."

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