In October of 2006 we saw one of my favorite Linux releases get unveiled: Fedora Core 6. It was a significant improvement in speed over the previous versions which I found to be nearly unusable with my hardware. Actually, what I’ve been playing with lately is the Fedora Core 6 Live CD that was just released toward the end of December, and this is a great way to see how much you like Fedora.
The future does look bright for Fedora with version 7 just a few months away. April 26, 2007 appears to be the current release date for Fedora 7 if all goes according to plan, but more often than not a release schedule doesn’t turn out as expected. For just having 6 months between releases I do have to say that it seems pretty ambitious:
- The release will now be known as Fedora 7 (without the Core) because they are combining both the Core and Extras.
- They will have 3 separate releases for Fedora:
Fedora Desktop: This is what you would probably expect from a Fedora release.
Fedora KDE: If you prefer to use KDE you’ll probably want to use this since it will include the K Desktop Environment. This will be the flavor of Fedora that I choose.
Fedora Server: One of the examples they give where this would be useful is “Bill needs to set up a DNS server, and his boss told him to use FSS; Bill has no Linux/Unix experience but is a proficient admin of that other OS.” It will be really interesting to see what this evolves into because Fedora is what we use on our server and it would be nice to have a website optimized version of the operating system.
- Improved wireless support.
- Better startup and shutdown times.
- Fast user switching so that users don’t have to logout to change users.
- Both a Live CD and DVD will be available.
- And there is much more…
Next Tuesday, January 23, we should see the first pre-release of Fedora 7 become available. All of the features won’t be implemented until February 20 and then after that the primary focus will be on fine tuning all of the new stuff. With Ubuntu 7.04 expected just one week before Fedora 7 it should be interesting to see the two Linux distributions go head-to-head with their milestones.
News Source: Phoronix
So three separate releases. It reminds me of what Cononical is doing with Ubuntu. Will be looking forward to this one.
I’m mostly looking forward to seeing what the Server version does because that is something Red Hat (the parent software) is pretty much known for.
Yeah there server edition are pretty good. In my sys admin class at school we are using the free knock off to Red Hat Enterprise CentOS which is actually pretty darn good.
Does the Fedora 7 Test 1 LiveCD contains Fedora 7 with KDE, or just Fedora 7 with Gnome? I have been unable to find any documentation on this matter on Fedora Project’s Website.
I haven’t tried it myself, but I’m pretty sure it has both on one CD.