Red Hat Begins Testing Core 5

Robert wrote to mention a CBR Online article which reports that Red Hat has begun testing on Fedora Core 5. From the article: "The next version of Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat's enterprise Linux distribution is not scheduled for release until the second half of 2006 but will include stateless Linux and Xen virtualization functionality and improved management capabilities. Fedora Core 5 Release 1 includes updated support for XenSource Inc's open source server virtualization software, as well as new versions of the Gnome and KDE user interfaces, and the final version of the OpenOffice.org application suite."

Comments

They should be farther along

[BennyB2k4]

They are actually behind their goals for releases. I've read elsewhere that it should be every 6 months.

"Produce robust releases approximately 2-3 times per year, using a time-based release model: A time for a feature freeze is set in advance, and an expected schedule for test releases is produced before the feature freeze date. (Important feature schedules will be taken into account when setting the schedule for Fedora Core releases.)"

http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html

Re:They should be farther along

[Anonymous Coward]

The most irritating thing about FC5 is the long wait... they've decided to leave ~9 months for it. The problem is that there are parts of GTK that have, over the last few months, *FINALLY* been optimized by someone who knows what they are doing -- and they are now dramatically faster (this is quite apart from the other massive optimization efforts for speed and memory going on in GNOME right now). All Fedora users are going to have to wait until the second half of 2006 before we see these improvements... and believe me when I tell you that GNOME/GTK desperately needs them.

It doesn't look like they will be backported, so it's GTK2.8 and the next version of GNOME... which means FC5... which means 9 months wait for something that's very badly needed.

Re:Mature?

[saikatguha266]

A common myth regarding Fedora. From http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraMyths

MYTH - Fedora is unstable and unreliable, just a testbed for bleeding-edge software

FACT - This misconception comes from two things:

1. From http://fedora.redhat.com/: "It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products."
   
2. Fedora has rapid releases, a short life-cycle, and a lot of new code.
   

As for the first item, this means that Red Hat uses Fedora as a platform to promote the development of new technology, some of which might end up in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This does not mean that Fedora is a dumping ground for untested code, it simply means that Fedora is a rapidly progressing platform.

For the second item, this does mean that Fedora is often running in uncharted innovative territory, but not that it is using too-new code. The programs in Fedora are generally stable releases or well-tested pre-release versions. There are guidelines behind the inclusion of pre-release software, and thorough testing is always done prior to Fedora Core releases.

Each version of Fedora Core receives updates from the Fedora development community that includes Red Hat for up to a year. Continuing updates from the Fedora Legacy Project may extend the life of a release to two years or more, depending on the release schedule. Refer to http://fedoralegacy.org/about/faq.php for more details.

We do everything we can to make sure that the final products released to the general public are stable and reliable. Fedora Core has proven that it can be a stable, reliable, and secure platform. Many businesses and organizations rely upon Fedora Core for both day-to-day tasks and, in some cases, critical infrastructure. Additionally, our well-managed packaging and review process adds an extra layer of safety not found in some other distributions. You can count on Fedora Core.

As someone who has used FC in production, I can attest to the its stability.

Re:skimpy

[un1xl0ser]

Stateless Linux (from http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/stateless/)

The Stateless Linux project is an OS-wide initiative to ensure that Fedora computers can be set up as replaceable appliances, with no important local state.

For example, a system administrator can set up a network of hundreds of desktop client machines as clones of a master system, and be sure that all of them are kept synchronised whenever he or she updates the master system. We provide several technologies for doing this.

The scope of the project is the entire OS, since we are trying to improve configuration throughout all packages. However, there are some packages which are specific to Stateless Linux:

        * readonly-root
        * stateless-common
        * stateless-client
        * stateless-server

Re:better wireless hopefully... and install...

[spazimodo]

Ubuntu has WPA support - search in Synaptic for WPA_supplicant. (You may need to enable Universe/Multiverse)

This post brought to you on a Dell D600 running Ubuntu Breezy Badger using WPA.