Fedora 7 Released

fedoraman writes "Fedora 7 has been released. With Xorg 7.3, KDE 3.5.6, GNOME 2.18, and version 2.6.21 of the Linux kernel Fedora 7 comes with all the latest and greatest open source desktop software. Fedora 7 drops the traditional 'Core' nomenclature, since it includes both what used to be termed the Core and Extra components by default. Fedora 7 is also the first release to be constructed with Fedora's revolutionary new build system, which is designed to improve the ease of developing derivatives and Fedora-based software appliances. As usual, extensive documentation and release notes are available. Torrents are also available and ISO images can be downloaded from mirrors around the world."

Comments

WOW Xorg 7.3?!

[isa-kuruption]

Not even x.org has 7.3 yet! Fedora is really on top of things!

Not quite correct. Still nice.

[c0l0]

It's not Xorg 7.3 that's packaged with Fedora, but Xorg 7.2 with the xorg-server 1.3.0 release. It still features very interesting software, like, for example, noveau, a free reimplementation of NVIDIA's hardware-accelerated 3D-drivers (still work in progress, of course), as well as a kernel patched with the all-new and highly anticipated mac802.11-subsystem that whould yield much better compatibility and performance for all things WLAN. I also like this idea of "Revisor", an application easily allowing for building customized bootable (install-)media with specific packages only.

Can you say Xen?

[jmorris42]

> Is there a good reason they seem to think they know better than Linus and all the other devs working hard on the standard kernel
> or is it just an ego trip for the developers at these distros?

Yes, there are lots of good reasons. We can start with Xen. All of the big distros support it but it isn't in the mainline kernel tree. So right there you blow away the ability to run the mainline kernel without breaking things. The list goes on from there. The latest device drivers that haven't yet made it upstream, bug fixes that are working their way upstream, etc. There are lots of other good reasons why a distro kernel gets patches.

SUSE, like RHEL is longterm stable. That means bug fixes and security issues get patched into the same base kernel that originally shipped with that version of the distro because revving the whole kernel would be a nightmare.

That said, Fedora does have a policy of trying to stay close to the upstream kernel, pushing their patches upline wherever possible and not being afraid to revv the whole kernel in the lifetime of a 'stable' release. But when it comes down to big patchsets like Xen that they really want to ship but that neither Xen nor Linus appear interested in seeing merged they don't really have much of a choice. Longterm, just as an interested bystander, I'd suspect Xen to disappear from Fedora once KVM gets stable enough to totally replace it for the non-enterprise workloads Fedora is aimed at.

One nice thing about Fedora7 is the buildtools

[crush]

The complete build process is FL/OSS!

The tool for taking all the RPM packages and composing them into an installation tree is pungi. It's FL/OSS.

The tool for taking source from CVS and turning it into packages is Koji and it's completely FL/OSS too

The tool for producing updated packages is bodhi and is FL/OSS

Be happy. The Fedora Project yet again has made major contributions to FL/OSS which can be enjoyed and improved by everyone. It means that Fedora is completely independent of Red Hat (apart from Red Hat's very generous donation of hardware and developers) and that anyone that wants to can easily produce a specialised "spin" of Fedora suited exactly to their own needs. That's one of the main innovations that Fedora is pursuing with the above: instead of being stuck dependent on the choices of a distributor you can benefit from the patched sources, even their packaging, yet diverge when needed. This should be the goal that every distribution follows, and the only thing that is similar in terms of flexibility is Gentoo, but that IMHO fails to provide an easy path for those that are happy with a distributor making the decisions for them.

I'll freely admit to being a Fedora and Red Hat fan, but I hope that the significance of the release of these build tools is not overlooked by people using other distributions.

Re:What's the story with Extras?

[spevack]

Core and Extras have been merged into a single repository, so those names no longer exist. But what you are looking for DOES exist. It's all there in the "Everything" version of Fedora. That's an install tree that we provide at (for example):

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux /releases/7/Everything/

Re:Nice but is it bloatware?

[dosius]

The last version of Debian worked on a 486/133 with 32 MB RAM, I'm sure the current ought to too...

-uso.

Un-hacked kernels (Slackware)

[spaceyhackerlady]

So it's not that Redhat/SuSe/Ubuntu "know better", it's that the distributions work on kernel stability a lot more than the kernel devs. This is NOT anything new. The days of thinking you should go get "the latest kernel from Linus" and just expect everything to work properly went away years ago. Did I used to go re-compile my kernel from the vanilla source? Sure. Do I do it anymore? Hell no, and without a good reason to I never will. If you want that sort of thing, pick a distribution that values the vanilla kernel. Otherwise stop griping.

Slackware (my favourite distro) uses utterly vanilla kernels. Want a new one? Download it from kernel.org, untar it, build it. No sweat.

I consider building a custom kernel to be an integral part of an installation: all the distro kernel does is bootstrap building the production one. All my systems run kernels that are a precise match to the hardware and my needs, with no superfluous junk. No superfluous security holes, either.

...laura

Re:Nice but is it bloatware?

[murph]

When the last version of Debian was new, wasn't that current hardware?