Fedora 19 alpha

The alpha test release of Fedora 19, "Schrödinger's Cat", was released on April 23, with the usual exhortation for users to test and report bugs. As currently scheduled, the beta release should take place in late May, and the target date for the final release is July 2, a date that has slipped significantly from the traditional May target date because of the especially late Fedora 18 release.

Installation

When the final Fedora 19 release is ready, FedUp will be the preferred method of upgrading. However, for those wanting to test the alpha release, the recommended approach is to do a fresh install using one of the installation images.

Although the installer posts suitable warnings about the fact that it is installing a test release and asks the user to click an "I accept my fate" button, the release is, as various users have already remarked, fairly solid. Notwithstanding one installer crash on the first attempt as the disk partitioning dialog got confused, your editor likewise found that the installation was painless, and the installed system was stable in some limited testing.

New stuff

There is the usual range of new components starting with the 3.9 kernel and an upgrade of the GNU C library to version 2.17. The release announcement notes that the default kernel is a debug kernel that allows the Fedora developers to understand system issues more easily, but may significantly impact performance; the release announcement points out how to disable the debug mode and notes that the kernel can be replaced with a non-debug alternative.

Several of the desktops see an upgrade in this cycle, with KDE Plasma Workspaces moving to version 4.10 and the GNOME-2-like MATE desktop moving to version 1.6. Perhaps most noteworthy is the upgrade of the GNOME desktop to version 3.8 with its support for a "classic" mode, the successor to "fallback" mode for those users who prefer a more GNOME-2-style interface. (Classic mode is available from the login screen after one has installed the gnome-classic-session package.) Your editor, who must confess to having largely deserted GNOME on his primary machine in the last few years, found that the classic mode does offer at least some of the comforts of familiarity from years past; a switch back from Xfce may be in the cards.

A number of programming languages are upgraded or added for Fedora 19. Perhaps most notable is Ruby 2.0. Scratch, a graphical programming environment that targets children learning to program is added, although there seems to still be some minor glitch in its packaging, since yum install says that the scratch package is unavailable. The GCC compiler is upgraded to version 4.8. A new Developer's Assistant feature aims to help beginning developers, as well as more experienced developers who may be new to Linux or Fedora, by automating the set up of development environments for various languages. The Node.js server-side software platform is also added.

Notably for 3D printing enthusiasts, Fedora 19 adds packages a number of 3D modeling and printing tools. Another notable change in a different vein is the addition of OpenShift Origin, the open source version OpenShift, a cloud application platform as a service. Other new features include the addition of the Syslinux boot loader as an alternative to GRUB, the new BIND 10 DNS server as an alternative to BIND 9, MariaDB as the default MySQL database (upgrading will replace MySQL on an existing system), and several systemd enhancements, including resource control, lightweight containers, calendar timers, predictable network interface names, and the message catalog. Fedora 19 will also provide many people with their first opportunity to make use of checkpoint/restore.

There are of course many more new features than noted here. The Fedora 19 feature list provides a more complete list. Given this fairly solid alpha release, things look reasonably promising for a timely final release.