What's New in Fedora Core 5 Test2 [LWN.net]

January 18, 2006

This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar

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.

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to post comments

What's New in Fedora Core 5 Test2

Posted Jan 19, 2006 10:21 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

The stack-protector has long been available as a patch by Hiroaki Etoh, but it operated by directly mangling raw RTL and was pretty much completely nonportable as a consequence (crashing GCC on SPARC, for instance): the feature in GCC 4.1 is a reimplementation by Richard Henderson and others.

However, the ABI used at runtime to call e.g. the stack-guard checks *has changed*, which means that any code compiled with -fstack-protector with the old patches *must be recompiled*, and if your libc includes a copy of the old stack guard code (as Gentoo's does), you'll have to take it out of there. (glibc-2.4 includes the new stack guard code, so FC5 is fine. This is hardly surprising given how many people @redhat.com were involved in the reimplementation :) )

What's New in Fedora Core 5 Test2

Posted Jan 19, 2006 10:34 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The old patch was called, variously, `SSP' and `ProPolice' at different times (and by different people? Its history is murky.)

`Assign a random and verifiable value to the stack' is a bad description. It populates a random `stack canary' from /dev/urandom at process initialization, then puts it at the top of the stack frame of all functions containing a char array above a certain size (or, with -fstack-protector-all, any function containing a char array); it also reorders the stack frame to ensure that parameters also appear on one side of the canary, while the function return address is on the other side of it. The effect is to ensure that buffer overruns that smash the return address will always smash the canary too, making `return-into-libc' attacks and many other classes of buffer overrun much harder.

(The only downside is that this drains /dev/urandom's entropy pool. gentoo at least has a patch that creates a /dev/frandom device that is seeded just once from the entropy pool and then becomes a normal PRNG, and a patch to SSP that uses it, but the frandom patch was rejected from the kernel tree on the basis that some daemon could equally well do the job. It could: but that would stop you from using it in SSP...)

What's New in Fedora Core 5 Test2

Posted Jan 19, 2006 16:02 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458) [Link]

I don't think that the lack of mention of Mono is surprising, and it shows that RedHat knows what really matters. Mono itself is just yet another language and yet another runtime, which is boring. Applications which use Mono, like F-spot and Beagle, however, are _very_ exciting, and they are widely advertised.

What's New in Fedora Core 5 Test2

Posted Jan 19, 2006 21:39 UTC (Thu) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

I haven't installed FC5 yet, but Anaconda in FC4 is seriously show its age.

The error handling for automated loads is poor. The driver disk support painful and poorly documented. The tools to create software RAID are difficult to use. When you create a software RAID 1 /boot partition, the boot loader is not set up on both harddrives.

For me one of the big issues with anaconda is that developing it is difficult. It uses the very recent and obscure libraries.

It needs to be generalized and simplified. For example, you should be able to use Anaconda to create live cds. There is work being done here, but I'm not sure the status.

The process to create respins is really complicated. You have to type commands like:

buildinstall --comp Test --pkgorder $BASE/pkgorder.txt \
--version 4 --product "Fedora 4 Respin 2" --release "4" \
--prodpath Fedora $BASE/fedora-custom

Sometimes you have to type the same command twice with different options in a specific order. Afterwards you can't really be sure you have done everything correctly.

I haven't tried FC5, but I bet that I'll like the UI changes... FC5 moved to yum so hopefully that makes creating respins a bit easier. Also the kickstart parsing was completely rewritten so hopefully error handling is improved. It's a pain to relearn commands and to rewrite all your scripts to deal with changes, but it's worth it in the long run.

Re: release cycle

Posted Jan 19, 2006 22:33 UTC (Thu) by katzj (guest, #23350) [Link]

Note that the 9 month release cycle for Fedora Core 5 is a one time thing so that some of the big infrastructural changes that have landed could happen. For Fedora Core 6, we should be going back to the more regular 6-ish months.

What's New in Fedora Core 5 Test2

Posted Jan 23, 2006 0:46 UTC (Mon) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link] (1 responses)

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?

Uh, more explanation please? You describe the new interface, and then say, "I don't like it, why did it need to change?" My first thought is, who cares if you like it or not? Tell us why and we might try to sympathize.

What's New in Fedora Core 5 Test2

Posted Jan 23, 2006 21:40 UTC (Mon) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

My first thought is, who cares if you like it or not? Tell us why and we might try to sympathize.

I thought it was implicit in his description: 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. Many of us dislike it when information is hidden away in an attempt to make it more palatable to newbies. A better approach, IMHO, would have been to have the first info pane give the user an option: "Technical information will be presented here for those who wish to know more about the internal of Linux, but it's not necessary that you understand it. If you'd rather turn it off entirely, click here."

(That said, I'm still a Slackware user for precisely this kind of reason, so don't mind me too much...)

Greg