Going back to 2009 with Fedora 11 has been delta RPM support to enable support with Yum for these packages that just contain the differences between one installed RPM version to the next version. With Fedora frequently pushing down new packages, delta RPMs have allowed those in bandwidth-constrained environments to more easily download updates since the file sizes of the deltas tend to be significantly smaller than full RPMs. Additionally, it's placed less of a burden on the Fedora infrastructure by having less disk space and bandwidth requirements. However, with DNF it looks like Fedora could revert to going back to full RPMs for distribution of updates.
While some having been thinking that Fedora developers might enable the Btrfs file-system by default in Fedora 22, that doesn't appear to be the case. Fedora is unlikely to see Btrfs by default until at least Fedora 23.
Red Hat's Christian Schaller has blogged about the current state of Fedora's Workstation project -- overall it's getting into very good shape -- being in between the alpha and beta stages for Fedora 21.
While Ubuntu/Debian have long preferred Dash as its /bin/sh implementation, in light of the recent Shellshock Bash vulnerability there's a discussion starting about Dash potentially becoming the default shell for Fedora Linux.
It's no secret that Fedora has had a challenging time sticking to their release schedules for a long time. With taking care of blocker bugs, Fedora Linux releases tend to frequently slip -- with Fedora 21 it's about two months behind schedule and we're just past the alpha stage. By the time Fedora 21 actually ships, Fedora 20 will have been at least twelve months old. However, a new release scheduling strategy might be tried starting with Fedora 22.
Here's some benchmarks done of the open-source Radeon driver stack in Fedora 21 to compare the performance of the EXA and GLAMOR 2D acceleration methods.
Since yesterday I've been testing the Fedora 21 alpha release and it's running quite nicely. I've also been trying out the latest release of DNF on Fedora 21 and it's been working out well as a drop-in replacement to Yum.
Fedora 21 in alpha form is finally expected for release today. With Fedora 20 having been released last December and the Fedora 21 release getting continually dragged on due to delays, here's a recap of some of the major changes being worked on for this next Fedora release.
23 September 2014 - Fedora 21 Features - 12 Comments
DNF 0.6.1 was released today and this updated open-source package manager picked up a few more features as it's still in pursuit of replacing Yum on Fedora systems.
Today was another FESCo meeting but fortunately no further Fedora 21 delay was announced today, but it could happen with the F21 alpha change deadline being today and the developers trying to get an approved build.
For those curious about what's going on with "Fedora.Next" in revolutionizing the Fedora Linux distribution, Matthew Miller -- Fedora's new Project Leader -- is presenting at LinuxCon Chicago today covering the ongoing working for the Red Hat sponsored distribution.
Ruth Suehle and Tom Callaway are presenting at LinuxCon 2014 Chicago tomorrow about many different Raspberry Pi hacks and other Linux capabilities of these low-cost, low-performance single board computers.
Fedora 21 won't even see its alpha release until September now, it's been delayed by a month compared to when it originally shipped, and there's no guarantee that this is even the last delay to be seen by this long-awaited release.
The Fedora ARM team has been doing a great job at testing and seeing a wide-range of ARM development boards and other consumer devices will work with the upcoming Fedora 21 release.
While Fedora 21 will be arriving later than anticipated, on the plus side is that the 64-bit ARM support is coming along well and the (indirect) delay gives developers extra time for polishing up this first Fedora Linux release with great AArch64 support.
Users of Fedora 21/Rawhide, Arch Linux, or other bleeding edge distributions where DRI3 is in play with the Intel Linux graphics driver, be forewarned about possible regressions.
23 July 2014 - Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 - 3 Comments
The latest Fedora Copr repository established provides a "kernel playground" whereby currently out-of-tree and/or experimental kernel features are enabled for developers and enthusiasts to try out.
The Linux 3.16 kernel is set to debut with a fair amount of new ARM hardware / SoC enablement, which in turn will soon benefit Fedora ARM users seeing as they are likely to lock onto this new version for the Fedora 21 release.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has gone ahead and improved the feature request of replacing Yum with DNF for the Fedora 22 release likely to happen in the first half of 2015.
Last week it looked like Fedora 21 might be delayed to allow more time for some ongoing work within the Fedora Server Working Group. Fortunately, a delay has been avoided for now.
Fedora 20 was released last December and the Fedora 21 schedule puts the next release as no earlier than mid-October, but there's already a call for delaying this next version of Fedora Linux.
While Fedora Linux continues to be mostly centered around GNOME, KDE stakeholders continue advancing the Fedora KDE spin and intend to make KDE Frameworks 5 available via Fedora 21.
Yesterday there was a guest post by a reader on Phoronix about the troubles in using the AMD Catalyst driver on Fedora Linux. While it involves more steps than most users would like, another Phoronix reader has written in this morning with the approach for getting the Catalyst 14.4 driver to work on Fedora 20 -- even with the Linux 3.14 kernel where the Catalyst driver doesn't yet have any mainline support.
While Jono Bacon leaving Canonical and his role as the Ubuntu Community Manager is shaking up the Ubuntu camp, within the Fedora camp, Robyn Bergeron has announced she is stepping down from the role as the Fedora Project Leader.
Developers have proposed adding even more features to Fedora 21, which is the next Fedora release shipping before the end of the year. There's already a lot of features under development and it's going to be a heavy release with nearly one year since Fedora 20, but even more work is on the way.
As the first point release to the recent DNF 0.5 debut, which introduced support for groups, there is DNF 0.5.1 that is less verbose with its text output.
Another Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting took place on Wednesday where another round of features were approved for the Fedora 21 Linux release.
Following today's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting is another round of fresh features for Fedora 21 that will premiere late into the year.
With the ongoing rework happening within the Fedora camp, there's emerging Fedora Workstation, Fedora Cloud, and Fedora Server "product" working groups. The work happening within Fedora Workstation is quite exciting and rejuvenating the project.
