Fedora Core Archive

It's been about 2.5 years since the first release of Fedora Core. And boy has it come long way! The new version of Fedora Core (FC) is featuring a number of goodies and performance enhancements as we describe below (and yes, it even includes a new logo).

Lunapark reviews Fedora Core 5, and concludes: "I would only recommend FC5 to people who do not own Nvidia video cards or do not mind tweaking a lot default settings to get things working. Otherwise stay with what you are using and wait for SUSE 10.1 or Ubuntu’s Dapper. But if you do stick with FC 5 and get past the quirks, it is quite impressive and I am already eagerly awaiting FC 6."

Many Fedora users are anxiously waiting for the Fedora Core 5 release, scheduled for Monday, March 20. Be warned that some of you may have to wait a little longer, however: the kernel shipped with FC5 effectively disallows the loading of any non-GPL modules. That behavior was a mistake, and a fix has already been made, but it is too late to get that fix into the initial FC5 release. So binary module users will want to wait until the first errata kernel is released (a few days, at most) before upgrading. Update: Elsewhere, an interview with Greg DeKoenigsberg who presently serves as Red Hat's Community Relations Manager and is on the Fedora Extras Steering Committee.

"The Fedora distribution is one of the most widely used GNU/Linux distributions. Although non-users sometimes dismiss it as too mainstream to be of interest, those familiar with it appreciate that it uses only free software and showcases the latest programs. Fedora Core 5 (FC5) is slated for release next week." Read more of the preview here. Elsewhere, Christopher Blizzard of Red Hat blogs about modifying Fedora to fit into the OLPC project needs and the optimization work being done on Fedora as a result of it using Red Hat open sourced tools like Dogtail.

"I've been hacking on and off with W. Michael Petullo on integrating LUKS into the GNOME desktop via HAL and patches are now upstream. I think it rocks. I've prepared a small screencast." What exactly is LUKS? "LUKS is the upcoming standard for Linux hard disk encryption. By providing a standard on-disk-format, it does not only facilitate compatibility among distributions, but also provide secure management of multiple user passwords. In contrast to existing solution, LUKS stores all setup necessary setup information in the partition header, enabling the user to transport or migrate his data seamlessly."

"The Fedora Project announces the third release of the Fedora Core 5 development cycle, available for the i386, x86_64, and PPC/PPC64 architectures. Beware that Test releases are recommended only for Linux experts/enthusiasts or for technology evaluation, as many parts are likely to be broken and the rate of change is rapid." The final release is planned for March 15th. Release notes will be uploaded soon, and download locations are listed in the release announcement.

"Although I hate to do it, it looks like we're going to have to slip Fedora Core 5 test3 by a week. There is an ABI change in the gcc/glibc stack that requires a rebuild of the entire distribution. Given that, there is no way that we'll be able to make a freeze date of Monday. So, test3 will now freeze on Monday, 13 February with a release date of Monday, 20 February."

Fedora Core, a popular flavor of Linux being developed by the open-source community, is hardly hefty by today's operating system standards. But to fit the tight specs for the $100 laptop being designed by MIT's One-Lap-Per-Child group, Fedora will need to go on a crash diet, concedes its overseer, Red Hat. The Linux software maker confirmed today that it has donated $2 million to the OLPC and joined as a corporate member and said it plans to put some of its brightest engineers to the task of slimming down Fedora before the laptops debut in early 2007.

"Due to the recent upgrade of gcc and the subsequent full rebuild of everything that gets built with gcc, including java stuff with gcj, and the need to further test package selection windows in Anaconda, system-config-packages for upgrades, and the development tree in general once we settle down the rebuilds, we have decided to delay test2. Here is a new schedule that we will be working toward."

"We are pleased to announce the release of Fedora Directory Server 1.0! This version fulfills the promise to open all of the directory server source code that we made almost 1 year ago - 12/8/2004 - the date at which Red Hat acquired the code. Here are some Screenshots."

This article describes in brief how to configure VNC server instances for one or multiple users on a remote machine, how to use VNC to start graphical applications on boot and finally how to enhance security by connecting to the server through encrypted SSH tunnels.

Red Hat has been working on an adaptation of Multi Level Security called Multi Category Security which is planned to be enabled by default on FC 5 along with other security enhancements

This light hearted review is a look at how a girl who uses Windows (and is non-technical) deals with using Fedora Linux instead. In fact, she likes it so much, she uses it all the time now. If she can use Fedora Linux, anyone can.

"When I initially published the article, Boot Fedora Linux Faster, neither my server or me was ready for 22k visitors in one day. It seems that there is a great interest in the topic of reducing boot time. So I think a challenge is in order to get Linux people together to try to reduce boot time."