Fedora News Archives

Fedora 15 has just been released! Fedora 15 is the first major Linux distribution shipping with the GNOME 3.0 Shell by default, and as usual, has a host of other Linux innovations.

Fedora 15 is set to be released at the end of May, and with a month having passed since Fedora 15 Alpha, it's now time for Fedora 15 Beta. Dennis Gilmore has announced the release of Fedora 15 Beta. "I beta one American dollar that you will love this release!"

The Fedora 16 name voting has ended. One of the leading proposals for the Fedora 16 codename was to call it a Beefy Miracle, but that will not happen. The Fedora 15 successor will be called Verne.

Ubuntu 11.10 is codenamed the Oneiric Ocelot, which is perhaps the most unique Ubuntu codename to date, but going up against Mark Shuttleworth's next distribution update will be Fedors 16. What's the codename for that next Red Hat release? It might be called a Beefy Miracle.

The Fedora Project and their upstream contributors are seeking help from you in testing their latest Fedora 15 spin to see how well the Linux power management works out.

Fedora 15 is gearing up to be another great release from the Red Hat camp with new features like Linux power management improvements, full systemd integration, SPICE support for virt-manager, and consistent network device naming, among many other features. When it comes to open-source graphics drivers, Fedora tends to be on the leading edge of development seeing as Red Hat employs some of the key developers like David Airlie and Jerome Glisse. With Fedora 15, besides shipping with all of the latest kernel / X / Mesa bits, there is one interesting change that's gone largely unnoticed from their feature lists, etc.

Dennis Gilmore has announced the official release of Fedora 15 Alpha. This next Fedora release, which is codenamed "Lovelock", brings a number of new features to this leading Linux distribution, including the GNOME 3.0 desktop.

It's that time of the year again when the Fedora Project seeks out a codename from the community for their next Fedora release. Once again, Bacon is proposed as a codename.

This news is a few days old, but not many people seem to have caught it while I was busy finishing up Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 and OpenBenchmarking.org: Btrfs may be the default file-system in Fedora 16.

The Fedora team this week is hosting their usual Graphics Test Week again, this time for packages that will be making their way into Fedora 15 in just a couple of months. Today is the Nouveau graphics driver test day followed by the Radeon test today tomorrow and on Thursday it will be testing of Intel graphics.

Adam Williamson has shared that he's looking at packaging Canonical's Unity desktop for Fedora. "Why? Well, a few reasons. Mainly, Unity’s an interesting project. I want to look at it and compare it to GNOME Shell and I think quite a few others do too, so it seems nice to package it so you can run both on Fedora. I don’t really want to maintain an Ubuntu install just to test Unity (can’t do it in a KVM VM as it requires compositing support). Also, though, I think it’ll do a bit to help keep everyone honest: if other projects show interest in providing Unity as an option for people to use, it increases the motivation for Unity's developers to make sure it can be easily built without non-upstreamed changes. Hopefully it also increases the motivation for upstream projects to work with the Unity developers to get their changes merged. It's the same for any project, really – if you have a wide base of users of a project across many distributions, it gives everyone involved a reason to work to make sure it's easy to maintain the project across distributions."

With Xen Domain 0 support finally going into the mainline Linux kernel, those interested in virtualization atop Fedora are now looking at getting the Fedora Xen host support back up to speed for the next release (Fedora 15) or by the time that Fedora 16 rolls out. The Linux kernels since Fedora Core 8 have not been capable of Xen Dom0 hosting, but with the Linux 2.6.37 upstream merge that brings pvops-based support, work is getting underway within the Fedora community to better prepare this KVM alternative.

The Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the release schedule for Fedora 15, the next release of this community Red Hat Linux operating system that was recently codenamed Lovelock.

It's official: "Lovelock" is the Fedora 15 codename.

"It's here! It's here! It's really here!" Jared Smith, the Fedora Project Leader, has just announced the release of Fedora 14 (a.k.a. Laughlin).

Earlier this month the Fedora community began proposing names for Fedora 15 with the proposals ranging from names like Malmstrom to Fortaleza and Gutzwiller. The list, however, has now been narrowed down to five potential candidates for the Fedora 15 codename.

Rather than coming up with the codename for the next Fedora release deep within Red Hat, the community is leveraged with anyone being allowed to propose a potential name prior to these names being reviewed by Red Hat's legal department and the voting on the final name then commencing by Fedora contributors. With this open process, there's also more than a few interesting name proposals with each release. Case in point, Fedora 14 could have been called Fytnargin. With the release of Fedora 14 now being just a month out, name proposals for Fedora 15 have started.

Fedora 14 Beta is now available. It features the latest Fedora packages including the improvements to the GNOME 2.32 desktop, Linux 2.6.35 kernel, and much more.

While there was a delay, Red Hat has released Fedora 14 Alpha this morning, which is codenamed Laughlin. Fedora 14 switches over from Upstart to the systemd sesssion manager, further enhances its Linux virtualization stack, adds support for the D programming language, easy IPMI management, and carries various other features as one of the leading Linux distributions.

Besides features like SystemD replacing SysVInit and a much faster JPEG compression/decompression library, one of the other proposals for Fedora 14 was to actually ship it on time. Red Hat's Fedora project has had a poor track record lately of shipping their alpha, beta, and final releases on time and none of the past five releases at least have actually made it out on their due date. John Poelstra, the Fedora Program Manager, sought to change this with Fedora 14, but the entire release schedule has already slipped.

Red Hat's John Poelstra who is the Program Manager for Fedora and its "feature wrangler" has proposed an interesting feature today for Fedora 14: to actually ship it on time. The goal would be to not only ship Fedora 14 final according to their release schedule, but the alpha and beta releases too.

Along the same theme of yesterday's article entitled Is PowerTop Still Useful For Extending Your Battery Life? today here are some results showing the power consumption of the past three Fedora releases (11, 12, and 13) from a notebook computer.

Fedora 13 had just launched a month ago, but work is already underway on Fedora 14. Fedora 14 is expected for release in late October or November, but there are already new packages in Fedora Rawhide and features are being worked on. The theme for Fedora 14 is also being tackled at the moment.

Following a last minute setback, Red Hat is set to release Fedora 13 this morning. Fedora 13 integrates many package updates and new features for this first major update to Red Hat's community operating system for 2010.

While Fedora 13 was scheduled to be released in one week, that is no longer the case. Red Hat's Paul Frields has announced that due to the blocker bug list not being cleared, the release of Fedora 13 has to be pushed back by one week.

Following a period of Fedora contributors proposing codenames for the release of Red Hat's next community operating system, Fedora 14, voting commenced. Fortunately, the name that's been decided upon is not Fytnargin.

As was reported last month, with development on Fedora 13 winding down for a release in two weeks, planning for Fedora 14 has got underway. One of the first steps taken by the Fedora and Red Hat communities is coming up with a new codename for the next release, for which they have been reaching out to the community for in recent times.

Fedora 13 will be released in less than a month and as such work for Fedora 14 is already gearing up. One of the first signs within the Fedora community that a new release is soon coming is the usual codename proposal period. Last night Red Hat announced it is looking for suggestions for the Fedora 14 codename.

Fedora 13 will be officially released next month and while we have already used it in testing out the Nouveau Gallium3D drivers and trying out the new Intel graphics, this week Red Hat is hosting community test days for the graphics stack in Fedora 13.

Following a one week delay, the first alpha release for Fedora 13 is now available. The final release of Fedora 13 is not due out until May, but this is the only development release of Goddard before this Red Hat Linux operating system reaches its beta stage.

Red Hat's Fedora lives on the bleeding edge of Linux development with many new features going into each release. While this is exciting for Linux enthusiasts and those looking to see the course Linux is on before most of this work ends up in other distributions, postponed releases have become a common occurrence for this free software project. It's tough thinking of a Fedora release in recent times that was delayed at least twice. The first alpha release of Fedora 13 (codenamed Goddard) was going to be due out next week, but that release is now pushed back by a week.

While it's exciting to have kernel mode-setting, RandR, and EXA / X-Video acceleration for NVIDIA hardware in an open-source driver that is reliable since the mainlining of its DRM code and its adoption in Ubuntu 10.04 and other distributions, Fedora has already employed Nouveau support to various extents in their recent releases.

To eliminate having to freeze the bleeding-edge Fedora Rawhide repository once the next release of this free software Linux distribution enters its own alpha/feature freeze, a new development branch has been created so that Rawhide can immediately begin hosting packaged for the next Fedora release. In other words, beginning next week once the Fedora Alpha freeze goes into effect, Rawhide will begin receiving packages that will not appear until Fedora 14. The in-development Fedora 13 packages will move to a new development directory.

Back in November one of the features that was talked about as a possibility for Fedora 13 was Btrfs system rollback support. One of the advantages of the Btrfs file-system compared to most other Linux file-systems is support for snapshots. With this Fedora feature it would automatically create a file-system snapshot before each yum transaction. In the event the RPM packages being touched cause havoc on the system or any problems arise, the user could simply reboot and choose an earlier Btrfs snapshot to boot. The Btrfs file-system is not yet stable and is not used by default on Fedora Linux, but it's been an install-time option since last year.

Before Fedora 12 was even released there were already feature plans for Fedora 13 and since that point new features have continued to be added to their feature plans, including Btrfs system rollback support. While the Fedora 13 feature freeze is less than a month away, a few new features continue to be added while the existing features continue to progress.

Package source control for Fedora has relied upon CVS since the inception of this Red Hat Linux distribution, but it's soon going to switch over to using Git instead. At the FUDCon event this week in Toronto, Red Hat's Jesse Keating has laid out these plans to stop using CVS and switch over to Git for its benefits: distributed management, it's faster than CVS, better patch management, and many upstream projects using this revision control system.

The next release of the Red Hat sponsored Fedora Linux distribution is going to be Fedora 13, which is due out in 2010 and already promises many new features like Btrfs file-system rollbacks and NFSv4. While there are already these features being worked on, it wasn't until tonight that we know what Fedora 13 is actually being codenamed. There was a codename proposal period followed by voting, and now the votes have been tallied up and the most popular name approved.

Fedora 12 was just released this week, but features for Fedora 13 have been in planning long before this release made it out the door. In fact, it was last month that we began talking about features for Fedora 13. One of the features though that has just been proposed for Fedora 13 is rather interesting and that is system rollback support via Btrfs file-system snapshots.

It's one of the last major distribution updates coming out this year, but Fedora 12 (codenamed "Constantine") is now available. Fedora 12 features performance improvements, Ogg Theora 1.1 support, graphics improvements (including ATI kernel mode-setting by default), many virtualization improvements, PulseAudio improvements, Multi-Pointer X with X.Org 7.5 / X Server 1.7, and many other new features.

With the release of Fedora 12 being just days away, it's that time of the year again where Red Hat and the Fedora Project are seeking out possible codenames for their next release, Fedora 13. Among the names that have been proposed so far are Segovia, Commodus, Buland Darwaza, Methodius, Plato, and Watergate. Proposals for possible Fedora 13 codenames are being accepted until later this month when voting will get underway by Fedora contributors. The finalized codename for Fedora 13 will be announced on the 5th of December.

Fedora 12 will not see the light of day for a few more weeks still, but the first features for Fedora 13 are now known. On the Fedora Project Wiki is now the Fedora 13 feature list.

This morning Red Hat has announced the release of Fedora 12 Beta. This is the last development release before the release candidate and then the final release due out towards the middle of next month. Fedora 12 brings improved performance, NetworkManager enhancements, graphics driver improvements, many virtualization improvements, Multi-Pointer X support in X.Org 7.5, and plenty of other changes. We cover most of the Fedora 12 changes in detail in our Fedora 12 Alpha To Bring Many Improvements and Fedora 12 Beta To Come Next Week articles. We also have many Fedora 12 news postings with other information.

As part of their usual roundabout with pushing the latest X.Org, kernel, and Mesa code into Fedora before each new release, for the next three days Red Hat is holding testing sessions focused on the open-source ATI/AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel graphics drivers, respectively. To make for an easy process even for those that may not be active Fedora users, there are Rawhide LiveCD images (in x86 and x86_64 flavors) that were spun last night by Red Hat's Adam Williamson. This code has all of the latest Fedora 12 packages, but sadly just shy of having the R600/700 3D support working.

The Intel Poulsbo Linux driver is a bloody mess, it's that simple. Unlike the main Intel Linux graphics stack, the one that supports the Poulsbo chip found on many Intel Atom-powered devices, is closed-source. While some could careless whether a driver is open or closed source, the Poulsbo driver is difficult to find and to get working on distributions outside of Ubuntu Netbook Remix. However, Intel has already decided to not support Ubuntu 9.10. There was an open-source Poulsbo DRM that was created, but it was rejected from the mainline kernel, on the basis of it being undocumented and just being used by a binary-only client.

Going back to May before the release of Fedora 11, features that were planned for Fedora 12 (the release that's codenamed Constantine) began to get laid out. Among these features were LVM enhancements, replacing nash/mkinitrd with Dracut, and using Empathy as the default instant messaging program. With time more features have come about for Fedora 12, such as re-basing the desktop environments to KDE 4.3 and GNOME 2.28, updating the kernel, etc. Over the weekend though, the Fedora Project Wiki was updated to reflect a whole batch of new features that are now planned for Fedora 12. Below are some of these new features.

After having gone to the community for looking at names, Red Hat has announced that the release of Fedora 12 will be codenamed Constantine. This name had the most votes and was approved by Red Hat's Legal department of being free of any potential issues. Constantine had beat out Umbria, Orville, Rugosa, and Chilon for having the most votes.

Last week Red Hat had to announce that the release of Fedora 11 would be be faced by a last minute delay due to a number of show-stopping bugs that had to be resolved in time. Fedora 11 was then supposed to make it out in the first week of June, but we have now heard that there is another delay facing Fedora 11.

Red Hat's Jesse Keating has shared on the Fedora announcement list that Fedora 11 will not be released in May as originally intended. Due to 24 bugs at present on the Fedora 11 bug tracker, they have postponed the release from the 26th of May to the 2nd of June.

Fedora 11 will be out next week, but planning for Fedora 12 is already well underway. Some of the Fedora 12 features have already been laid out like a user-space LVM library, enhanced multi-seat support, and replacing nash/mkinitrd with Dracut. It's also time to start thinking about the codename for this next Red Hat release.

Fedora 11 with all of its Nouveau support, Btrfs capabilities, and kernel mode-setting support glory isn't being released until later this month, but the features for Fedora 12 are already being planned out.