Fedora Core Archive

The first of three Fedora project GNOME 3 Test Days is taking place tomorrow (Thursday 2011-02-03) in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC. Join others and the GNOME development team to test out GNOME 3 and help make sure it's stable and polished. The testing is easy, can be done from a live image, so there's no need to have Fedora installed or to be a Fedora user, and you can help out with just ten minutes of your time. This blog post has more details on the event and how you can get involved.

Fedora is holding a Test Day tomorrow (2011-01-27) to test a new network device naming scheme, as implemented by the biosdevname utility provided by Dell. biosdevname aims to give network interfaces names that are both consistent and appropriate to their physical attributes (onboard device number, or PCI slot), an approach that has been kicked around upstream for a while. This new system will likely come to most distros in future. The Fedora test day will concentrate on making sure it behaves as intended on both new installations and upgrades.

"Fedora developer, Matt Domsch, has announced that Fedora 15 is breaking the conventional ethX naming scheme used for Ethernet devices by adopting a new scheme called Consistent Network Device Naming."

After a decision that got a lot of negative feedback, Jared K. Smith from the Fedora project gave some insight on why Fedora's board decided not to include SQLNinja in future builds. "As many of you are well aware, the Fedora Board made a decision not to include the SQLNinja package at our November 8th meeting. In the meantime, I've received quite a bit of feedback, and I'd like to take this opportunity to provide a bit of clarification on the Board's decision.

Fedora 14 has been released. "The Fedora Project today announced the availability of Fedora 14, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. The Fedora Projects leads the advancement of free and open source software with a new distribution released approximately every six months."

The Fedora 14 Beta was released today, but as a Network World article points out, it "will be the first Red Hat supported distribution to let users choose MeeGo as their desktop." This new release will also include the Sugar interface, intended for netbooks, and "will also be the first version to fully incorporate Red Hat's VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), called SPICE, or Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments. SPICE will allow Fedora to host virtual desktops that can be accessed over a network."

"No, Fedora 13 Linux is not coming out today. The release was pushed back by a week to fix a number of blocker bugs, among them is an interesting one that many users might simply consider to be just a papercut nuisance."

The Beta release of Fedora 13 (codename "Goddard") blasts off today, true to its namesake, scientist and liquid-fueled rocketry pioneer Robert Hutchings Goddard. The Fedora 13 Beta release gives an early peek at free and open source technologies that reach new heights of functionality and usability. The Beta milestone is when the Fedora Project encourages users, developers, and administrators of all types to download and try out the release early. While generally the Beta is reasonably stable, this is the time for users to exercise their favorite parts of the system and report any lingering bugs before the final release.

Distrowatch takes a first look at Fedora 12 and concludes that it is an excellent release with faster package management including yum with the Presto plugin that pulls in delta updates by default, improved security such as a smooth SELinux configuration and hardware support. "After spending several days with Fedora, I find that I'm happy with this release. The live CD by itself was a bit underwhelming, but the distribution as a whole has been excellent. This is probably the most stable and most polished release the Fedora team has put together to date."

Phoronix has a done a set of benchmarks with the Fedora 12 Intel driver and concluded that it performs better than previous releases of Fedora. "Compared to Fedora 11 especially, Fedora 12 offers much-improved Intel Linux graphics. Besides just the frame-rates being better, when using Fedora 12 we have encountered less problems with kernel mode-setting and quirks with different hardware configurations. In fact, the Intel experience is quite pleasant atop Fedora 12. This is good news for those running Fedora 12 now and should be even better news for those that will receive these updated packages in their distributions next year."

Fedora 12 has been released today. "I'm proud to announce the release of Fedora 12, the latest innovative Linux distribution from the Fedora Project, a global, collaborative partnership of free software community members sponsored by Red Hat."

"If you're running newer hardware, there are some definite advantages to installing a 64-bit operating system. But, if you still need to run any 32-bit applications, you'll need to have the 32-bit support libraries installed. Different Linux distros handle this in different ways. For 64-bit Ubuntu, finding the proper 32-bit support packages is a simple matter of opening up the Synaptic Package Manager, and searching for the string 'ia32'. With 64-bit openSuSE, 32-bit support is already built-in, so you don't have to do anything. With Fedora, though, it's a whole different story. Not only are the 32-bit packages not already installed, the Fedora folk don't provide any documentation on how to install them. The directions I found via Google were outdated, and wouldn't work. I finally resolved the problem by sking a Red Hat employee in my local Linux Users Group."

Adam Williamson reports that the Fedora project is now producing automated nightly live builds of Rawhide, its development branch - now you can test the freshest Rawhide without having to install it at all. Grab the nightly builds here.

Fedora 11 comes with many improvements in package management including a update version of RPM and Yum that reduces memory consumption and performs faster. Fedora 11 also includes the presto plugin for Yum that downloads the binary deltas for updates and typically saves over 80% of the download size. Linux Mag takes a look with some interesting benchmarks that show modest improvements overall.