Fedora Weekly News Issue 35
From FedoraNEWS.ORG
Written by Thomas Chung on 2006-02-26
This issue is also available in the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish
Welcome to our issue number 35 of Fedora Weekly News (FWN), the weekly newsletter for the Fedora community. The latest issue can always be found here.
| Table of contents |
Announcing Fedora Core 5 Test 3
Jesse Keating (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating) announces in the list (http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2006-February/msg00059.html):
The Fedora Project announces the third release of the Fedora Core 5 development cycle, available for the i386, x86_64, and PPC/PPC64 architectures. Beware that Test releases are recommended only for Linux experts/enthusiasts or for technology evaluation, as many parts are likely to be broken and the rate of change is rapid. ... Notable Features of FC5 Test 3 ============================== * Xen, now with x86_64! * Package selection within the installer has been reenabled. * Rebuilt again on later gcc4.1 snapshot for performance and security * Hibernate should be functional on a wide variety of hardware again (use pm-hibernate to test) * PPC Install CDs are bootable once again * Unified SRPM set instead of one per arch * Lots of bugfixes from Test 2 release testing * 1600+ Extras packages conveniently available via yum Latest version of release notes are available from here (http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc5/test3-latest-en/). Please see this page (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC5Test3CommonProblems) for an updated list of important notes for FC5test3 in order to avoid common problems and troubleshoot problems that you may see.
He also notes in his blog (http://jkeating.livejournal.com/15887.html):
The biggest thing for me was the new layout of the distribution. No more arch specific sources. Of course, given that this is a test release, something is supposed to be wrong, and I did fulfill that. The source ISOs didn't contain any source RPMS. Whoops.
Attention: Proprietary video driver users
Warren Togami (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/WarrenTogami) points out in his email an important message by Mike A. Harris (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MikeAHarris) on devel-list (http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-February/msg01178.html):
There have been a number of bugs reported in Red Hat bugzilla against X which have recently been tracked down to 3rd party video drivers being the culprit behind the problem the user was experienced. In many of the cases however, it wasn't obvious that the 3rd party drivers were at fault because the user was actually using the Red Hat supplied drivers, and not using the 3rd party driver that they had previously installed. ... Both ATI and Nvidia's proprietary video driver installation utilities replace the Red Hat supplied libGL library with their own libGL. Nvidia's driver installs a replacement libglx.a X server module, removing the Red Hat supplied X.Org module in the process. ATI's driver may or may not replace libglx.a with it's own, I haven't checked (but if someone could confirm that, I'd appreciate knowing for certain). ... Conclusions: If you are going to use any 3rd party proprietary drivers, please do yourself and everyone else a huge favour, and at least get your drivers from reputable 3rd party rpm package repositories such as livna.org (http://rpm.livna.org/livna-switcher.html) which packages both the nvidia and ati proprietary drivers in rpm packages which install the drivers sanely without overwriting Red Hat/Fedora supplied files.
FUDCon Delhi 2006 Report
Rahul Sundaram (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RahulSundaram) reports (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConDelhi2006/Report?action=print) in his participation and experience in FUDCon Delhi 2006 (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConDelhi2006) as Fedora Ambassador India. In his report:
FUDCon Delhi 2006 was organized as part of LinuxAsia in Feb 9th 2006. Though it is supposedly a business focused events it has been overwhelmed by students and other developers interested in all sorts of things. Foss.in still seems to do a better focusing on developers and the community if thats where your interests are. ... The good thing in Fedora is that we get to do it every six months or so and every new release gets a lots of attention in the form of downloads, new users, negative criticisms and praise. Helping the community involved in a more open fashion and communicating both within the project and to the interested users and everyone out there is what we need and what are going to continue doing.
FOSDEM 2006 Report
Thomas Canniot (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ThomasCanniot) also reports (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/FOSDEM/Report?action=print) his participation and experience in FOSDEM 2006 (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraEvents/FOSDEM) as Fedora Ambassador France. In his report:
FOSDEM was held the 25 and 26th of February in Brussels (in Belgium). Even if it is a developer event, many users were there as well asking many questions about free software in general. ... Photos of the booth and the event in general are available from: http://mrtomlinux.multiply.com/photos/album/5 Fedora Booth is shown in the 9 first photos. More photos about FOSDEM 2006 (no Fedora booth in them): http://flickr.com/groups/fosdem
On a related note, FOSDEM released FOSDEM 2006 Interviews (http://www.fosdem.org/2006/index/interviews) with various projects.
Nrpms.net ReadMe
According to Nrpms.net ReadMe (http://www.nrpms.net/):
Due to recent and historical changes in Fedora, nrpms.net will not be providing Gnome & Mono rpms for Fedora Core 5 and onwards. This change has been brought forward by the recent decision of Fedora to include the Mono stack in the next release, and the packagers' desire to further stem the duplication of effort that occurs on nrpms.net; aswell as the further synchronisation of the Gnome and Fedora release cycles and the political changes that have happened in Fedora. As such, the nrpms team will focus on providing packages into Core and Extras directly and the use of nrpms.net rpm packages for all Fedora Core versions will be deprecated once FC5 is released.
Review: Fedora Core 5 Benchmarks
Phoronix.com (http://phoronix.com/) released a review, Fedora Core 5 Benchmarks (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=404&num=1). In the review:
Since the inception of the Fedora Core Project, thanks in part to Red Hat, Fedora has been largely leading the way for other distributions to be based upon it as well as setting the bar for future Linux distributions. ... One of the areas improved with Fedora Core 5 thanks to GNOME v2.13/2.14 is speed improvements throughout the desktop. The font rendering has been improved as well as a new memory allocater dubbed GSlice in GNOME v2.14, which is also scheduled for a release on March 15.
Red Hat offers Linux eye candy alternative
CNET News (http://news.com.com/) released an article - Red Hat offers Linux eye candy alternative (http://news.com.com/2061-10795_3-6042651.html). In the article:
The next version of Red Hat's Fedora Linux will include software to give the operating system some of the eye candy of a rival Novell project-- but it will use a less intrusive mechanism, advocates say. Novell's project is called Xgl (http://www.novell.com/linux/xglrelease/), and Red Hat's alternative is AIGLX (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RenderingProject/aiglx), short for Accelerated Indirect GL X. X refers to the Xorg software that handles graphics in most Unix and Linux computers, and GL to the OpenGL standard for 3D graphics.
BTW, It's Fedora Core from Fedora Project not Fedora Linux from Red Hat. See Fedora Project FAQ (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAQ).
Banshee: Among Linux music players...
Linux.com (http://www.linux.com/) released an article - Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/02/14/235210). In the article:
Over the last few years, the number of Linux music players has mushroomed, providing a variety of applications to suit different people. I've tried several Linux music players since I started using the operating system, but none of them were perfect for my requirements. I recently tried out an increasingly popular music player, Banshee, and have found a new personal favourite.
On a related note, Christopher Aillon (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ChristopherAillon) mentioned iPod (http://www.apple.com/ipod/ipod.html) with Banshee (http://banshee-project.org/) in his blog (http://christopher.aillon.org/blog/dev/fedora/20060222-banshee.html).
LUKS: There is no security on this earth...
David Zeuthen demonstrates (http://freedesktop.org/~david/crypto/) LUKS (http://luks.endorphin.org/) which is a hard disk encryption tool for Linux in his blog (http://blog.fubar.dk/?p=64). According to his blog:
I’ve been hacking on and off with W. Michael Petullo (http://www.flyn.org/index.html) on integrating LUKS into the GNOME desktop via HAL and patches are now upstream.. I think it rocks. ... Hopefully we can get these bits into FC5; the patches themselves are pretty simple but you also need HAL and gnome-mount from CVS. I’ll do releases of the latter two later this week.
Fedora Core 4 Updates
During the week of February 20 - February 26, Fedora Project released 11 Fedora Core 4 Updates (http://fedoranews.org/cms/FC4) including 0 Security Advisory.
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