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."

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 [redhat.com]

Re:Off to Debian

[tolan-b]

Fedora uses yum as the backend for up2date for its updates, no accounts required.

Re:*cough* Ubuntu

[Anarke_Incarnate]

how is that suspicious? They started in 2004 in October. 4.10 is basedon y/mm. The release schedule is 6 months. They then came out with 5.04. Doesn't this make sense?

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 [fedoraproject.org]

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/ [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 [fedoralegacy.org] 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/ [redhat.com])

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.

Any chance of an English translation of this??

[Tim Ward]

I know this site is for technically literate people, but really!!

"improved management capabilities" I can cope with, but "stateless Linux and Xen virtualization functionality" and "open source server virtualization software" are worthy of the worst type of social science academic paper or local government policy document!

Re:A little clarification?

[R.Mo_Robert]

I'm assuming they just mean the final version of OpenOffice.org 2.0, which had been in testing for quite some time.

Re:Any chance of an English translation of this??

[metalhed77]

why not just look it up on say, google?

here I'll even link you, www.google.com [google.com].

If you're technically literate enough to read slashdot you should know that google is your friend. I promise you that the first documents for search terms 'xen virtualization' and 'stateless linux' are very useful.

Final Version?

[SnarfQuest]

and the final version of the OpenOffice.org application suite.

Did I miss some news? Have they actually stopped development of Open Office?

Re:I'm not down with the Ubuntu terms...

[jcupitt65]

Yes, something you download.

In Synaptic, click Settings / Repositories, click Add, tick the Universe box, click OK. Now search for WPA again and you should see the package. Except if you don't have a working network connection :-(

You'll also notice more packages available: my Synaptic has 17,000+ of them, heh.

Re:5?

[LnxAddct]

They are advancing fine, every major release deserves a major number. These aren't minor releases, Core 4 was the first distribution using the new GCC 4.0 at the time, it also has default Xen support and a new yum manager that is much faster than the old one. Also Fedora Extras was establsihed with Core 4 and a bunch of other stuff. There have been similar milestones with the other Cores (such as integrating SELinux). Each core is a significant advancement over the previous core and deserves a major number change, not a minor number. I'm understating the improvements here. They aren't doing this to inflate their version number, it just so happens that enough people are helping out that they can get kick ass releases out pretty fast, not to mention Red Hat pays many engineers to work on it 5 days a week. They have however recently cut back their release schedule from every 6 months, to every 9 months to allow them to spend more time fully developing certain functionalities that can't be coded in a 6 month timeframe. Also for the curious minded, the Fedora community just finished up a fairly long community discussion about its new logo [fedoraproject.org]. The way that the winning logo was designed I thought was neat, you can read about it here [capstrat.com].
Regards,
Steve

Re:Off to Debian

[Erwos]

up2date is being retired in favor of the yum front-end "pup".

-Erwos

Re:They should be farther along

[Dammital]

"... parts of GTK that have, over the last few months, *FINALLY* been optimized by someone who knows what they are doing..."

You're talking about Federico's profiling effort against the GTK file chooser? Yep, he's doing some [ximian.com] good [ximian.com] stuff [ximian.com].

Re:They should be farther along

[justsomebody]

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

??? Now, where did you hear that stupidity?

Reasons for delay are:
- Trusted X (SELinux based X11)
- Xen integration
- Free Java replacement
- Live CD
- RHDS integration
- Actualy trimming setup to 1 or 2 CD-s
- Boot speedup
- New sound server
- Library deprecation

Here is Wiki about it for you to get your facts straight
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC5Future [fedoraproject.org]

This are all too big plans for them to keep at 6month release. That is why this was changed to 9 months not GTK. GTK being speed up is just one of additional features that coincides with FC5 timing, not the reason.

Re:What is XENSOURCE Virtualization ?

[argoff]

XenSource is the company, Xen is a modified linux kernel pair that allows multiple opperating systems to run on the same physical hardware. It is different that other virtualisation because it uses a kernel hack rather than complete emulation of the foriegn host to create this environemnt. Because of that, it has a very small overhead - typically under 4%.

They have Xen kernels in the package list for FC4, and I used them without much difficulty. I thought it was rather nice, I set the virtual machines to auto start upon bootup of the parent kernel. Another nice feature is that virtual machines can be transfered "on the fly" while still running, between different physical hardware on the same subnet.

Re:Stateless Linux

[Coryoth]

What we need is a standard way for X windows to have a thing like 'screen' were you can save your current output and move it to any computer that can handle X windows.

You mean like xmove [debian.org]? Basically xmove starts up a pseudoserver which clients can connect to. At startup clients connecting to the pseudoserver display on the default XServer, but can be moved to any other display on the network.

I agree that a cleaned up easy to use xmove system would be a nice idea though.

Jedidiah.

Re:Congrats Fedora Core Team!

[bani]

how exactly did redhat "fuck" small to medium businesses?

also, rhel is $349 [redhat.com]. not $500+. and for what you pay, you get miles better support SLA than microsoft.

Re:Congrats Fedora Core Team!

[bani]

Once you are up and running, you are on your own.

from the redhat web pages (which you might actually bother reading sometime before making claims which are easily refuted):

basic edition:

Web support: 1 year Installation & Basic configuration
Phone support: 30 days Installation and Basic configuration

Scope of coverage: 30 days telephone / 1-year web Installation and Basic configuration

And you have to pay $349 again in 1 year, or you have violated the EULA and must remove all copies of RHEL from your server.

bullshit [redhat.com].

when your support subscription expires, you have to remove RHN, not RHEL.

nice attempt at FUD though. are you employed by microsoft?

Re:100% FUD

[bani]

well gee, none of the other distros "wrote" or "contributed" apache, the kernel, mysql, sendmail, ldap or gcc either.

so I guess debian, gentoo, and all the other distros are just as much "at fault" or "to blame" as redhat?

or are you saying debian and gentoo or any other distro has individually contributed more money and software to open source than redhat?

redhat has employed many opensource developers for about 10 years now. it's not hard to see how that could ring up into $millions$.

like i said, just because you're unaware of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.