Latest Fedora Core 5 beta arrives

Fedora Core 5 is getting closer and closer to its official release date, March 15, and this Monday, the Fedora Project showed the way by announcing its second beta release of the Fedora Core 5 Linux distribution.

Fedora is a community-supported Linux distribution. It also serves as the basis for Red Hat's enterprise Linux distributions.

The new Fedora is available for the i386, x86_64, and PPC/PPC64 architectures. It's recommended that only battle-tested Linux users try out the beta, since many of its newest parts of it are expected to be semi-functional at best.

For the 32-bit Intel platform, this edition has been optimized for Pentium 4 CPUs. While it also supports earlier Intel Pentium-class chips and the AMD and VIA variant chips, it's no longer optimized for the first Pentium family because "because Pentium-class optimizations actually result in reduced performance for non-Pentium-class processors, and Pentium 4 scheduling is sufficiently different (while making up the bulk of today's processors) to warrant this change," according to the release notes.

That said, Fedora will run, in full graphical mode, on systems running with a 400 MHz Pentium II and 256MB of RAM.

For those who aren't quite so ready to plunge into the cold water of a beta release, the Fedora Project is providing an illustrated tour of the new release.

This is not just another beta release of a slowly evolving operating system. This version of Fedora is the first to include Mono. Mono is a Novell-funded project that delivers some Microsoft .NET compatible tools, including a C# compiler and a CLR (Common Language Runtime).

Mono's being included in Fedora, not because Fedora's developers believe that there's a great desire to import .NET programs to Linux, but, as Jeremy Katz, a lead Fedora developer, explains in his blog: to bring "beagle, f-spot, and tomboy [to Fedora], adding these apps has also necessitated adding Mono to Fedora Core. ... They're each very nice and do a good job of improving the experience for the users of our desktop."

Beagle is a desktop search tool, while f-spot is an easy-to-use desktop photo organizer and editor, ala Google's Picasa for Windows, and tomboy is a wiki-style note-taking program. All of them are very popular, especially with Gnome users.

Speaking of Gnome, Fedora now comes with version Gnome 2.13.4. If all goes well, the final Fedora Core 5 will come with Gnome 2.14. For those who prefer KDE, KDE 3.5 is available.

Underneath the shiny new interface, Fedora is running X.org's new X Window System 7 and a modified, depending on if you're running a uniprocessor and SMP (Symmetric Multi Processor) system, Linux 2.6.15 kernel.

In another change, Fedora Core 5 also now supports Xen 3, the latest version of this virtualization technology. Xen users must use a virtual kernel. If all goes well, Red Hat's future RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 5 enterprise users will be able to use Xen in a production environment in late 2006.

This version has also been mostly compiled with the new GCC 4.1. GCC 4.1 is also included with the distribution.

One development program, JOnAS (Java Open Application Server), a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) server, is no longer included in the main distribution. It's planned that it will be made available in Fedora Extras.

The new beta of Fedora is available by BitTorrent, which is the recommended way to download the operating system, and by http and ftp from various Fedora mirror sites.

With this release, Fedora has also announced that support for the older Fedora Core 3 has been transferred to the Fedora Legacy Project. There, Fedora 3 users will be able to find security and critical bug fix errata packages for this obsolete release.

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