Fedora 22: Don't be glum about the demise of Yum – this is a welcome update

Retreat from the dark side

Review The big news with Fedora 22, just delivered, is the Fedora project actually managed to stick pretty close to its proposed schedule.

Fedora 22 arrived just one week later than scheduled – but what's a week after the month-long delays of the last few release cycles?

It would seem that the recent top-down restructuring of the Fedora project is working, at least in terms of development time. The Fedora release announcement characterises Fedora 22 as: "Fedora 21 after it'd been to college, landed a good job, and kept its New Year's Resolution to go to the gym on a regular basis."

I would hesitate to endorse the gym bit since I found this release a little sluggish, but it builds on the very nice base that was Fedora 21 and brings in all the latest packages.

That new structure in the Fedora project has seen Fedora 22 released in three "flavours:" Cloud, Server, and Workstation. All three build out from the same base, adding packages relevant to the individual use case.

Although I tested both the Server and Workstation options, I'll primarily be focussing on the Workstation variant since that's the desktop version most users will want.

Perhaps the most interesting change is that Fedora 22 no longer uses Yum to manage packages. That may comes as a shock to some since, if you're like me, the first thing that springs to mind when you think of Fedora is Yum.

However, Yum has been deprecated in this release and replaced by DNF and hawkey for package management.

The good news for long-time Fedora users is that DNF is very close to being totally command-line compatible with Yum. And Yum is even aliased to DNF, so you can still type "yum install mypackage," and, once it's done telling you Yum is deprecated, it will install as always. But that will change in future releases, so you're better off getting used to typing "dnf install mypackage".

In short, yes, Yum is gone, but oddly, you may not even notice.

The installation process hasn't changed much in this release. I've criticised the Fedora installer in the past so I won't repeat that here except to wonder – once again – why confirmation buttons are at the top of the windows. I can't think of another piece of software on any platform that does this.

The most visible change in this release is a version bump for GNOME. Fedora has long served as one of the best showcases for GNOME Shell and Fedora 22 is no exception. This release updates GNOME to 3.16, which is notable for its new, lighter theme and revamped notifications system.

The first thing you'll notice when you fire up Fedora 22 is that GNOME's default dark look has been toned down a bit. Ever since GNOME 3.x débuted its default (and not very customisable) theme has been black. That's subtly changed in this release with many elements moving to a lighter shade of grey.

It may not sound like much, but the result is much easier on the eyes, especially all the white text against a dark background, which is now considerably less garish.

Roomy and less gloomy, if a little bit sloooow

The notifications system has been revamped in this release as well: gone are the bottom-of-the-screen notifications that always covered up key elements of the app I was using (particularly terminal windows). Instead, notifications have been moved to the top centre of the screen where they're easier to see and dismiss. The notifications history view has been rolled into the calendar menu item in the top bar.

It's worth noting, too, that there appears to be a Fedora 22-only element to the notifications. Long-running Terminal processes will pop up a notification when they finish, which is helpful because it lets you, for example, start compiling something which you can then send to the background and move on to something else. You'll get a notification when your compile (or other task) is complete.

There are some apps that still need a tray-style menu – I'm looking at you, Skype – and for those there is still a legacy tray menu that acts like a drawer and tucks away off screen in the bottom left corner when not in use.

The new notifications system in GNOME 3.16 is nice, but it unfortunately appears to have come at the cost of the media player controls, which are nowhere to be found in the top bar in this release. The plan is to add those back in GNOME 3.18, but I couldn't find a way to use them in this release.

As with the last couple of GNOME releases, there's an option to run GNOME atop Wayland and support for Wayland continues to improve. In fact, the GNOME project says Wayland support is "approaching its final stages," but in my limited testing it remains too unstable for day-to-day use.

GNOME 3.16 is also notable for adding two new "preview" apps: one for ebooks (currently limited to comics in .cbr and other digital formats, though .epub support is in the works) and another for calendar. Fedora doesn't ship with either of the new apps installed, opting to stick with Evolution for calendaring and, well, nothing for ebooks (the very popular Calibre is in the repos).

Both of the GNOME apps are in the repos if you would like to test them out. They're both simplistic and a little buggy at the moment, but Calendar shows some promise of filling what I consider the biggest hole in the default GNOME software stack that most distros use.

Speaking of the rest of the GNOME stack, it has – as you might expect – been updated in Fedora 22. Fedora sticks with the traditional GNOME software for the most part, Evolution for email and calendar, Firefox for web browsing, Rhythmbox for music and Shotwell for organising your photos.

Then there's Nautilus, the default file browser which has about 30 per cent of the features it once had. The good news with Nautilus in this release is that the delete key will once again, er, delete files (the last version changed this to ctrl-delete). To counter the possibility that by pressing "delete" you actually meant, "no, keep it", there's a new, easy to spot undo option.

GNOME is of course not the only way to run Fedora 22 Workstation. There are spins for just about every popular desktop environment. It's worth noting that the Xfce spin has made the rather significant upgrade to Xfce 4.12, which brings some very nice changes to the Xfce desktop. Similarly, the KDE spin gets updated to the latest Plasma 5 desktop environment, which features the new "Breeze" theme for KDE.

Other Fedora-specific improvements include the usual developer tools updates. Fedora shows developers the love with the latest version of popular web development frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django. Perl, Python, PHP and most other popular programming languages are similarly updated.

The Server and Cloud versions of this release gain some added support for popular container and deployment solutions like Vagrant and Project Atomic, which is designed to deploy and manage Docker containers.

By and large, Fedora 22 is a welcome update. The chief problem I encountered is that it felt a bit sluggish next to Ubuntu. Whether that's the result of GNOME or something more on Fedora's end is difficult to say; it was just that Ubuntu GNOME felt faster when running alongside Fedora 22.

Suffice to say, if you're used to Ubuntu 15.04 with Unity or something even lighter and snappier, Fedora with GNOME 3.16 will probably feel a little on the slow side.

Relative to Fedora 21, number 22 makes for a very welcome update. That with the fact that Fedora appears to be back on track with a six-monthly release schedule is good news indeed for Fedora fans. ®

Ferocious Fedora 20 review: Cutting edge Linux still as sharp as ever ..

If you want to a bleeding edge desktop or server Linux, then Fedora is the Linux distribution for you. If you want to play it safe, try something else.

While Heisenbug — programmer jargon for a bug that disappears or changes behavior when you try to isolate it — uses the newest-of-the-new open-source programs it's not hard to set up. Its installation program, Anaconda, as J. A. Watson shows in his step by step Anaconda walk-through, is very easy to use. If you've setup a computer from a DVD or USB stick before, you'll have no trouble with Fedora 20.

Live session & installation

Fedora 19 was a troubled system, with kernel bugs and other problems. When I first tested it, it would not even let me login. Not so this time around. From the start, everything was rather peachy, I must admit. Boring, but peachy.

The free software thingie means you are restricted to just some casual browsing and no fun at all. I can accept ideology, and in this sense, Ubuntu is no greater charmer either. The live session is only there to give you a sampling of what's ahead.

The installer is still kind of tricky, but I've spat enough poison and venom in my previous two reviews, so I won't be doing it now. We will see this installer in action again soon, but that's a different story altogether. Anyhow, after a bit of careful fiddling, I was able to setup a proper quad-boot configuration.

Since the installer is kind of dangerous, you pay more attention to what you're doing. Then, probably because whoever designed it figured there could be terrible moments of panic, they added all kinds of safety measures, so you won't be killing your data easily, unless you really insist. There's a lot of mouse clicking needed before you format existing partitions. Paradoxically, the unclever layout makes it safer. But more error prone.

The installer does have a bunch of visual glitches. The text is positioned flush with the surrounding div, so it appears as if some letters are cropped. There are so many ways the installer can be prettified, but we won't go there.

Using Fedora

The installation took about 10 minutes. There were no problems. And now, we need to make Fedora presentable. What I did was try new themes, new windows decorations, new wallpapers, installed easyLife, which in turn setup the RPMForge and Livna repositories for extra stuff, like codecs, Skype, Java, and more, and finally edited the basic layout of the desktop to my liking. You will soon see the results. And I promise a dedicated article on this topic!

Package management

I was most pleasantly surprised by both Apper and yum. They are much faster than before, even with all the compression and bandwidth optimization. The system update for 445 packages took maybe five minutes, at full line speed. Nice, given the distro was only recently released, and usually the repos choke in the first week or so.

easyLife

An essential part of all my reviews - this will get your codecs and such. Now, for all those who emailed me about alternative Fedora desktop and repo management tools, I've not forgotten, we will talk about this soon.

Multimedia playback

After this step is complete, you will have your pr0n helper utils, namely Flash and MP3, so you can watch your stuff. Moreover, HD playback worked just fine, and I tested a WebM file, with Xvid and Lame, in Dragon Player, without any issues.

Desktop effects

For some reason, I was not able to activate them.

Applications

Fedora's default set is okay, but not mind-boggling. You do get rekonq and Kmail, rather than Firefox and Thunderbird. Then, there's the Calligra Suite. On top of that, you also get the lovely Marble geo-educational tool, which was also the only application to crash, just once, bringing the total distro sum of problems to one. Yup. SELinux was quiet, too.

Printing

It did not work using the standard KDE utility, but you can solve the problem by installing thesystem-config-printer tool, normally intended for Gnome, logging out and back into your session. Similar to doing the same thing on Ubuntu and friends. More later.

Resource usage

Fedora 20 Heisenbug KDE edition is not the leanest distro. It tolled some 500MB worth of RAM, and the CPU utilization was normally about 3-5%. Overall, the distro was fairly responsive, but you can do better.

Look & feel

You know how I think that openSUSE 13.1 KDE is among the prettiest desktops around? Well, then, why not bring its beauty to the rest of the Linux world? Which is exactly what I did. I installed the openSUSE Plasma theme, using the KDE Settings Menu, and did some extra cool work. Remember, I promised a separate tutorial.

Problems?

No, not really. The logout can be slow, but it's nothing special. Other than that, the system was perfectly stable. There were no hangs, crashes or other bugs. Even the KDEWallet was silent, and there's the new Wireless utility we saw in Kubuntu. In the worst case, when logging in, it will prompt you for your password, but that's it. No bogus failed messages, no issues there. Stable, robust. Suspend & resume worked fine, too.

Conclusion

Fedora 20 Heisenbug, adorned with the KDE desktop, has some issues. For example, the printing is borked, the desktop effects do not work, and there's the manner of default boredom. Moreover, Marble crashed once. But that's all really.

Other than that, the system worked fine. After 30 minutes of serious customization, I had everything, including a range of popular, mainstream software, like GIMP, VLC, Skype, or Steam, I had all my codecs, and the desktop looked beautiful. This was so much unlike the typical Fedora experience, and I'm feeling rather intrigued. True, you have to sweat a little to get what you need, but the end result is quite pleasing. Gone is the beta quality, it seems. And so, for the first time, yours truly, I recommend you consider Fedora for your production environment. Overall grade, 8.5/10. Now, fix those effects and printing!

Cheers.

Fedora 16 beta Review

Fedora 16: Linux home for lost Ubuntu GNOMEs

What lies beneath the Jules Verne submarine art?

By Scott Gilbertson 

Review The Fedora Project has released the first beta of Fedora 16.
Dubbed "Verne" and sporting desktop artwork that echoes Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Fedora 16 is shaping up to be a worthwhile alternative to Ubuntu 11.10, particularly for those that aren't happy with Canonical's home-brewed Unity shell.
Among the big changes in Fedora 16 is GNOME 3.2, the latest version of the GNOME 3 shell Ubuntu ditched for Unity.
Fedora has always been a reasonably popular Linux distro, but now it is acting as a kind of flagship for the GNOME 3 desktop, since Ubuntu has gone its own way. Fedora releases are likely undergoing much closer scrutiny from the Linux community.

This first beta release is definitely rough around the edges, but if you want to check out the new GNOME 3.2, Fedora 16 is one of the best ways to do it. Indeed the main reason to install the new beta (something I suggest you do in VirtualBox) is to see how GNOME 3 is progressing.
This marks the second incremental update for GNOME and it is clear that there will be no new major features coming for some time. Instead the GNOME team has been focusing on polishing and improving the foundations of GNOME 3.
Perhaps the most noticeable of the smaller new features in this version of GNOME is the new integrated chat and messaging system that is now built in to GNOME. The new features mean you'll be able to automatically log in to your chat and messaging accounts without needing to launch a separate application. Thanks to a new set of notification options you'll be able to reply to messages, accept file transfers and even take calls, all from the GNOME shell.
The other fixes to GNOME 3's early pain points include a more permanent way to display the workspace switcher when you're in overview mode. In other words you can now actually get to the workspace switcher on the correct side of the screen when you need it. You also now get status bar notifications for external storage devices with options including mounting, browsing files or ejecting. Status bar messages can also now display a counter, for example to show the number of unread emails or new chat messages.

Comfort zone breaker

Perhaps more useful for those who would like to get real work done in GNOME 3 is the new "do not disturb" toggle switch in the user menu. While all the functionality of do not disturb mode is actually part of GNOME 3.0, there's no easy way to turn it on. Version 3.2 adds a switch in the user menu and, when enabled, do-not-disturb mode will set your messaging status to "busy" and stop the endless stream of notifications.
For those accustomed to GNOME 2.x, GNOME 3 is still a long way from comfortable. But, like KDE struggling from 3 to 4 before it, the GNOME team is slowly putting the bugs to rest and adding in the missing features.

Fedora 16 will be more than just a showcase for GNOME. The distro has quite a few new tools in its own right, including the Linux 3.0 kernel. There has also been some talk of moving to the btrfs filesystem as the default for Fedora 16, but at least for now the beta (and the alpha before it) use ext4.
Also new is support for the GRUB2 bootloader on x86 systems, which replaces GRUB legacy.
There are also some application updates in the Fedora 16, including the latest version of Blender, a 3D imaging tool, the latest Firefox beta and the usual updates for Perl and Python. It's also worth noting that Fedora has not followed Ubuntu's lead in moving to Mozilla's Thunderbird for email. Fedora 16 is sticking with the Evolution email client.
For a complete list of everything that's coming in Fedora 16 (not all of which is in the current beta release) be sure to read the change list on the Fedora wiki.
Fedora 16 will be making the leap to GNOME 3 not just for the shell, but for all the underlying system tools as well. That means there will be no way to boot Fedora 16 into GNOME 2.x. There is a simplified "fallback" mode for hardware that doesn't measure up to GNOME 3's requirements, but effectively, from here on out, GNOME 3 is GNOME.
For those who've already made peace with GNOME 3, Fedora 16 is looking like one of the best ways to run the new shell environment. Not only is the default theme nicely integrated, GNOME 3 feels extremely stable on Fedora 16, even as a beta build. ®

Fedora 16 Beta Released

The Fedora Project proudly announced last evening, October 4th, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta version of the upcoming Fedora 16 operating system, due for release in November 2011.

Dubbed Verne, Fedora 16 Beta is powered by Release Candidate 6 of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.1.0, it features GNOME 3.2 and KDE Software Compilation 4.7 desktop environments, lots of SELinux enhancements, updated Haskell, Perl and Ada environments, and much more.

"The Beta release is the last important milestone of Fedora 16. Only critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading to the general release of Fedora 16 in early November."

"We invite you to join us in making Fedora 16 a solid release by downloading, testing, and providing your valuable feedback." - said Dennis Gilmore in the mailinglist announcement.

Highlights of Fedora 16 Beta:
· Linux kernel 3.1.0 RC6;
· GNOME 3.2 desktop environment;
· KDE Software Compilation 4.7.0;
· GRUB2;
· Systemd services management;
· SELinux improvements;
· 1000 System accounts;
· Added Chrony NTP client;
· Removed HAL;
· Removed ConsoleKit;
· Automatic Multi-seat support;
· Support for cloud computing;
· Restored support for Xen;
· Enhanced Spice 0.10 app to manage virtual machines;
· Many improvements for developers;
· Aeolus Conductor;
· Blender 2.5;
· Boost 1.47;
· Glasgow Haskell Compiler 7.0.4;
· Haskell Platform 2011.2.0.1;
· GNOME Input integration;
· libvirt networking support improvements;
· New mkdumprd for kdump;
· Perl 5.14;
· Static analysis of CPython extensions;
· Sugar 0.94;
· TigerVNC 1.1;
· USB Network Redirection.


Fedora 16 Release Schedule:

August 23rd, 2011 - Fedora 16 Alpha release
October 4th, 2011 - Fedora 16 Beta release
November 8th, 2011 - Fedora 16 final release

Download Fedora 16 beta:-


Download beta Release 16


Download beta Release 16

Fedora-16 : Verne - Alpha Release

As always, Fedora continues to  develop and  integrate the latest free and open sourced software. The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora. For more details about other features that are making their way into Rawhide and set for inclusion in Fedora 16, refer to the website:

Fedora Alpha Release 16

This release is an installable, testable version of the code and features being developed for Fedora 16 (Verne). The software has bugs, problems, and incomplete features. It is not likely to eat your data or parts of your computer, but you should be aware that it could.


Download it here:

Download Alpha Release 16

The Whole Story

Fedora 15 LXDE is a Fedora 15 Spin, an alternate edition of Fedora, “tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application sets and other customizations.” Presently, seven Spins have been released. These are, in order of popularity about the time I hit the Publish button, the KDE, LXDE, Xfce, Security, Games, Electronic-Lab, and Design-Suite Spins.
The Xfce Spin has already been reviewed here. This article presents a review of the LXDE spin, the first for it on this website.

Installation Process: Like other Spins, Fedora 15 LXDE is available for download as a Live CD ISO image. Unlike the main (GNOME 3) edition, there is no DVD or bfo installation image for this edition or for any other Spin.
The boot menu options allow booting into the Live environment, where installation can then be started. Installation is not possible without first booting into the Live environment. There is an option to “Boot from local drive,”
However, attempting to boot from the local disk always generates the error shown here. This happens not just with the LXDE Spin, but with all the Fedora releases, including the main edition.
All the Fedora spins share the same installation program with the main edition. Anaconda 15.31 is the version of Anaconda, the Fedora system installer, that ships with this latest release. The changes I see in this version are just cosmetic. The available disk partitioning methods are the same. Disk encryption is supported (see how Fedora protects your computer with full disk encryption).
LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager, is the default disk partitioning scheme. Ext3, Ext4 and XFS are the supported journaling file systems, with ext4 as the default, even for the boot partition. Fedora 15 is the first version to have built-in support for btrfs, the B-tree file System, but it is only available when installing from a DVD or bfo ISO image. (You might be interested in how to install Fedora 15 on an encrypted btrfs file system.)
Installation of the Fedora 15 Spins, and of the Live CD version of the GNOME edition, is not installation in the traditional sense, but rather, a copying of the Live image to disk. So, what you see on the Live desktop is what you get after installation.

Desktop: The LXDE desktop is a very simple and highly configurable desktop environment. Memory footprint is small and CPU usage is minimal. A new installation of takes up less than 2 GB of disk space, far less than a new installation of other Spins. The menu features all the necessary application categories except the Games category. Like the Xfce Spin, there are no games installed.

The file manager is PCManFM, named after the author’s online moniker. I find it a lot more fun to use than Thunar, the file manager on the GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. There is support for tabbed-browsing. Clicking on a folder opens it in place, rather than in a tab. Though not in this release, directory browsing on the side pane has been implemented, and should be available in a stable release soon.

When dual-booting with other operating systems and distributions, you can mount and browse their partitions. Out of the box, you can even read and write to ntfs partitions, that is, you can access your Windows files and folders from the file manager.

If you click on an image file in the file manager, the system will attempt to open it in GXine, the default media player, and even after changing the default behavior to open all image files in GPicView, the installed image viewer, the system would still attempt to open them in GXine. GPicView, by the way, is one of the best image viewers I have used. It has more features than the default image viewer on the Xfce spin.
The system will popup this dialog window when a video DVD is Inserted.
And this if it is an audio CD. The problem is that for some reason, the default application, GXine, is unable to play audio or video media, and the problem does not seem to lie with it because after installing Rhythmbox and Totem, I still could not play any audio or video media.

Attempting to configure a printer brought up this dialog window, and adding a printer was not an automated process. I found that using the printing utility (Administration > Printing) was a lot more involved than using the printing service’s Web interface (localhost:631). (Most distributions will auto-detect and configure a connected printer.)

Installed and Available Software: Some of the main applications installed by default are:

• Firefox 4
• Pidgin Internet Messenger
• Sylpheed, one of the best email clients
• Gnumeric, a spreadsheet application
• Osmo, personal organizer
• Abiword
• Gxine
• LXMusic, a music player for LXDE

There are, of course, many more applications that you can install using yum, the command line package utility, or Yum-Ex, the graphical package manager.

Fedora 15 Alpha: Beta Finally Released!

As always, Fedora continues to develop and integrate the latest free and open source software. The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora. For more details about other features that are making their way into Rawhide and set for inclusion in

The Purpose of the Alpha Release

This release is an installable, testable version of the code and features being developed for Fedora 15 (Lovelock).The software is going to have bugs, problems, and incomplete features. It is not likely to eat your data or parts of your computer, but you should be aware that it could.

You have an important part to play in this release. Either install or run a Fedora Live instance of the Fedora 15 Alpha release, then try using a few applications or activities that are important to you. If it doesn't work, file a bug. This release gives the wider community a set of code to test against as a very important step in the process of making a solid Fedora 15 release. You can make the Fedora 15 release better by testing this release and reporting your findings.

What's New in Fedora 15 Alpha

GNOME 3

GNOME 3 is the next major version of the GNOME desktop. After many years of a largely unchanged GNOME 2.x experience, GNOME 3 brings a fresh look and feel with GNOME Shell. There are also many changes under the surfaces, like the move from CORBA-based technologies such as GConf, Bonobo and at-spi to dbus-based successors.

Since the requirements of GNOME Shell on the graphics system may not be met by certain hardware / driver combinations, GNOME 3 also support a 'fallback mode' in which we run gnome-panel, metacity and notification-daemon instead of GNOME Shell. Note that this mode is not a 'Classic GNOME' mode; the panel configuration will be adjusted to be similar to the shell.

The fallback will be handled automatically by gnome-session, which will detect insufficient graphics capabilities and run a different session.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is an office productivity suite that will replace OpenOffice. It will be completely open source and driven solely by the community supporting it. It has a word processor, presentation creator, spreadsheet creator, database creator, formula editor, and drawing editor.

systemd

Fedora 15 has replaced Upstart with systemd. systemd uses services files located in /lib/systemd/system for services, and /etc/systemd/system for configuration. A dozen desktop daemons [list them] have been initially converted to use systemd service files and small number of programs have been patched to take advantage of it. systemd is compatible with legacy SysV init scripts and rest of the migration will happen incrementally over time.

Dynamic Firewall

Fedora 15 adds support for the optional firewall daemon, that provides a dynamic firewall management with a D-Bus interface.

DNSSEC for workstations

NetworkManager now uses the BIND nameserver as a DNSSEC resolver. All received DNS responses are proved to be correct. If particular domain is signed and failed to validate then resolver returns SERFVAIL instead of invalidated response, which means something is wrong.

KDE 4.6

This release uses KDE 4.6 by default as the KDE Desktop environment. KDE 4.6 offers new features such as it will be HAL-free (featuring udisks/upower Solid and Power Management backends), systemd password agent, improved bluetooth support using bluedevil bluetooth framework. Also in the works is kde-integration to libreoffice and switching the default phonon backend to gstreamer.

BoxGrinder

BoxGrinder is an easy to use command line tool to create appliances (virtual images) for various platforms (KVM, Xen, VMware, EC2) from simple plaintext application files.

Ecryptfs in Authconfig

Fedora 15 brings in improved support for eCryptfs, a stacked cryptographic filesystem for Linux. Starting from Fedora 15, authconfig can be used to automatically mount a private encrypted part of the home directory when a user logs in.

Indic Typing Booster

Indic Typing Booster is a predictive input method for ibus and scim. It suggests complete words based on partial input, which can then simply be selected from a list, and boost one's typing speed for more enjoyable input.

LZMA for Live Images

By using LZMA for the live images it will allow for more packages to be shipped on the live image, allow the space constrained images to be better and for the smaller images faster to download.

LessFS

LessFS is a data deduplication project. The aim is to reduce disk usage where filesystem blocks are identical by only storing 1 block and using pointers to the original block for copies. This method of storage is becoming popular in Enterprise solutions for reducing disk backups and minimising virtual machine storage in particular.

Xfce 4.8

Xfce 4.8 has a number of improvements and new features including the Xfce menu will support menu merging, allowing graphical menu editors like alacarte to work in Xfce, the task list windows can now be filtered by monitor and improved multi-head support. Also Thunar has been ported from thunar-vfs to gvfs, PolicyKit support in xfce4-session, multilib enhancements for xfce4-panel plugins and the run dialog now runs with the users full session environment.

Tryton

Tryton is a three-tiers high-level general purpose application platform under the license GPL-3 written in Python and using PostgreSQL as database engine. It is the core base of a complete business solution providing modularity, scalability and security.

RPM 4.9

RPM has been updated to 4.9 with improvements like a pluggable dependency generator, built-in filtering of generated dependencies, additional package ordering hinting mechanism, performance improvements, and many bug fixes all over the place.

Sugar 0.92

Provide the latest Sugar Learning Environment (0.92), including an enhanced activity set to provide an stable demo environment for Sugar as well as an environment for developers.

New Package Suite Groups

The Graphics suite group has been renamed to the Design group and the Robotics SIG has created the Robotics Package Suite which is a collection of software that provides an out-of-the-box usable robotic simulation environment featuring a linear demo to introduce new users.

Fedora 13 Launch!

At last F-13 is here! So ROCK IT!

As always, Fedora continues to develop (http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions) and integrate the latest free and open source software (http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features). The following sections provide a brief overview of major changes from the last release of Fedora. For more details about other features that are included in Fedora 13 refer to their individual wiki pages that detail feature goals and progress:
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/13/FeatureList
Throughout the release cycle, there are interviews with the developers behind key features giving out the inside story:
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews
The following are major features for Fedora 13:
*Automatic print driver installation — refer to Section 4.3, “Printing”
*Automatic language pack installation — refer to Section 4.4, “Internationalization”
*Redesigned user account tool — refer to Section 4.1, “Fedora Desktop”
*Color management to calibrate monitors and scanners — refer to Section 4.1, “Fedora Desktop”
*Experimental 3D support for NVIDIA video cards — refer to Section 4.1, “Fedora Desktop”

Some other features in this release include:-

*A new way to install Fedora over the Internet — refer to Section 2, “Installation Notes”
*SSSD authentication for users — refer to Section 2, “Installation Notes”
*Updates to NFS — refer to Section 5.9, “File Systems”
*Zarafa Open Source edition, a new open-source groupware suite — refer to Section 5.4, “Mail Servers”
*System rollback for the Btrfs file system — refer to Section 5.9, “File Systems”
*Better SystemTap probes — refer to Section 6.2, “Tools”
*A Python 3 stack that can be installed parallel to an existing Python stack — refer to Section 6.2, “Tools”
*Support for the entire Java EE 6 spec in Netbeans 6.8 — refer to Section 6.4, “Java”

Features for Fedora 13 tracked on the feature list page:
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/13/FeatureList
A discussion putting these features in context may be found at:
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Talking_Points

Red Hat has officially released Fedora 11

Red Hat has officially released Fedora 11, a Linux distribution for developers that is a testbed for features for its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product.

The new Linux distribution, named 'Leonidas', was made available for download on Tuesday. It includes OpenChange, which promises to give any email client native access to Microsoft Exchange. The technology uses an open-source version of Mapi, Microsoft's Messaging Application Programming Interface, to do this.

In addition, it provides several virtualisation improvements, including an upgraded console, a redesigned creation wizard for virtual-machine guests, and SELinux support for guests. Other new features are better support for fingerprint readers and the inclusion of the ext4 file system as default.

Fedora 11 also comes with the MinGW Windows cross compiler, which allows developers to cross-compile software for Windows while remaining in a Linux environment, according to Red Hat.

"Communities of users and developers are [now] empowered to make an impact on open-source software, to excellence in engineering, and to innovation," Max Spevack, Red Hat's community architecture team manager, told ZDNet UK.

"Significant work has continued on the boot process, and Fedora 11 should consistently boot for most users in somewhere around 20 seconds," he added.

End users will enjoy added benefits such as 'mime-type' detection and revamped volume control. The former allows for automatic detection (and installation if the user so desires) of applications that can handle unknown file-types. The latter simplifies the user's sound experience.

However, one analyst questioned whether Fedora 11's compatibility with Microsoft environments, or its improvements in sound or boot processes, will have an impact.

"Fedora is another small step for Linuxkind," said Clive Longbottom, service director at Quocirca. "It sounds really good, I'm sure it does what you want it to do and it has made improvements all round. And yet it isn't what people recognise or feel comfortable with. You can improve it all you want, but until it is a brand people demand, it will remain a techie toy."

A group of the Fedora Community's core release-engineering team members spent the release day conducting a review of Fedora's engineering and release processes, the fruits of which will begin to be seen in Fedora 12, Spevack said.

Red Hat releases a new Fedora distribution twice a year.

This article was first published on ZDNet UK

NEWS

This week Announcements suggests reading the release notes for "Fedora 11 (Leonidas)". PlanetFedora highlights some choice posts from Fedora blogs including one on the relevance of PPC as a primary architecture. Ambassadors reports that "Fedora stars at Flisol Caracas". QualityAssurance is packed with information on "Test Days" for SSSD and Virtualization. Developments warns of a "Presto No Go" and shares some "Ext4 fallocate() Happiness". Translation reflects a huge amount of activity including "Documentation Decisions for Fedora 12". Artwork wonders if there will be a Plymouth plugin for Fedora 11 Leonidas. The Weekly Webcomic peeks and pokes at some color preferences! Virtualization includes a look at a new libguestfs release and other salient developments.

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