A quick look at what's new in Fedora 7 [LWN.net]

The Fedora Project wiki has some release highlights for the upcoming Fedora 7 release. Here's a quick look.

Fedora 7 will have Spins with different combinations of software to meet the requirements of end users. Each spin contains a very small boot.iso image for network installation. Users will be able to add GNOME and KDE to create live CDs that will also work as a single disk install. Other users looking for an upgrade path may spin a regular image for desktops, workstations and servers. A third possibility is to create a set of DVD images that include all the software in the Fedora repository.

For the desktop user Fedora 7 will have GNOME 2.18 and KDE 3.5.6. Fast User Switching has been integrated, display devices can be hot plugged and work automatically, thanks to the inclusion of Xorg Server 1.3, and NetworkManager presents a graphical interface that allows users to quickly switch between wireless and wired networks for increased mobility. Also Fedora 7 has a new "Flying High" theme, Firefox 2, improved I18N support, and the SELinux troubleshooting tool 'setroubleshoot' is enabled by default. The kernel has a new FireWire stack for more robust device handling and it implements dynamic ticks for improved power management. The experimental nouveau driver has been integrated within Xorg and the kernel for those with nVidia cards. The mac80211 (formerly Devicescape) wireless stack is also part of the Fedora kernel.

Smolt is an opt-in hardware profiler used to get anonymous, automated hardware information from users. It has been integrated with firstboot in the installer and all data is available on the Smolt homepage. The profile information will be used to encourage cooperation from vendors in improving end user hardware experience, and to prioritize development and quality assurance on commonly used hardware.

The Fedora Directory Server base is now part of the Fedora software repository. Also all of the Python software available in the repository uses Python 2.5.

All in all, Fedora 7 is shaping up to be great release.

A quick look at what's new in Fedora 7

Posted Apr 26, 2007 9:01 UTC (Thu) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link] (3 responses)

And it has freely redistributable firmwares for all the Intel wireless cards. Better out-of-the-box experience!

A quick look at what's new in Fedora 7

Posted Apr 26, 2007 10:10 UTC (Thu) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link] (2 responses)

"freely redistributable", but proprietary closed source binary blobs? If so that would be a step back for Fedora while Ubuntu if finally seeing the light with a full free distro for the next release.

A quick look at what's new in Fedora 7

Posted Apr 26, 2007 13:06 UTC (Thu) by Soruk (guest, #2722) [Link] (1 responses)

How does Ubuntu (plan to) support these Intel wireless cards?

A quick look at what's new in Fedora 7

Posted May 3, 2007 16:11 UTC (Thu) by bdw (guest, #16047) [Link]

What they currently do is offer a repository so you can download those drivers. It's disabled by default.

IMHO, I think Fedora should so something similar to minimize the amount of black magic for those that are new to Linux. :)

A quick look at what's new in Fedora 7

Posted Apr 26, 2007 9:36 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

Does the mention of NetworkManager mean that this is to be the default in FC7? It was included in previous versions but not, so far as I know, made visible to non power users.

I've been using it pretty happily since FC5 or so, on laptops, I don't think it's very useful for servers, business desktops or trivial DHCP-only home desktops so hopefully if it /is/ now the default it can be disabled for those scenarios.

A quick look at what's new in Fedora 7

Posted Apr 26, 2007 15:23 UTC (Thu) by katzj (guest, #23350) [Link]

NetworkManager is on by default with the live images (and installs from the live images), but not with the more traditional install media. And it can definitely be disabled even in the first case.

A quick look at what's new in Fedora 7

Posted Apr 30, 2007 17:27 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

"Each spin contains a very small boot.iso image for network installation"

This is incorrect. The boot.iso is shared across all the spins.