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Fedora Core 5 Available
Jan Slupski writes "New release day today. Fedora Core 5 CD images are now available for download (i386, ppc, x86_64) on the ftp servers or via the torrent page." Linclips also has a short screencast on some of the default functionality.
Actually, this *is* a bug. It was not intentional on the part of the Fedora folks.
Of course, I don't *like* binary drivers very much, but ATI and NVidia have agreed to stick with 'em if you want 3d support on their modern cards. I have a Radeon 9250 (with the 128-bit datapath), which is about as peppy a card as you can get and still have open source drivers.
If the Open Graphics Project ever releases any hardware, unless it's $400 or something like that, I'll buy it -- it'll be fully open source.
If one vendor would release even a half-decent card and support it fully with open-source drivers, I'd buy it in a moment (binary microcode is okay, but I want everything running host-side to be OSS).
I know that few people feel this way, and most gamers are happy just using binary drivers and the current NVidia or ATI cards, but there are a group of people who feel the same way I do.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
While it's true that Fedora is a proving ground for new technologies, it's a mistake to say that it is in "perpetual beta". Rawhide, the development branch of Fedora, is in perpetual beta. Fedora Core is the stable branch of Rawhide. If it's not stable then something is wrong. So while on the one hand Fedora is not intended to be enterprise-grade and I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the GP, on the other it does have its own test process and its own devel/stable release cycle.
Also, Fedora doesn't have point releases because point releases are old-fashioned. There's no need to wait for bug fixes to accumulate before making them available anymore because tools like Yum can be used to make them available immediately. New features are added every six months or so in a new major version, but it serves the same purpose as what used to be called a point release. The only difference is in the numbers.
Then why does the Ogg Vorbis FAQ say, "it is completely free, open, and unpatented"?
Why does the Flac FAQ describe it as an "open patent free codec"?
Please explain in what sense they are encumbered.