Dell’s IdeaStorm provided a method for Dell customers to provide feedback to the company on what consumers really wanted. Not surprisingly, the biggest request was for Dell to pre-installed Linux on their Desktops and Laptops. Currently there are vendors who support Linux on their computers, however most of this focus has been on enterprise level linux (Red Hat Enterprise Desktop, Novell SuSE Desktop) and not necessarily free community distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu.

If you pay attention to Linux news, I’m sure you’ve heard that Eric S. Raymond (commonly called “ESR”) has dumped Fedora in favor of Ubuntu. In case you’re wondering who he is, he is the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar which is one of the best essays about open source development (highly recommended reading by the way). The first thing that might come to mind is “so what?” So what if this open source advocate switched?

While Adobe is hard at work at version 9 of the Flash plugin for Linux, there was a critical security update that affected version 7 for Linux. It is recommended everyone update their flash plugin. Users of the macromedia.repo who have configured yum, should run: # su -c 'yum update flash-plugin'

AMD released their first X86 based 64 bit processor over 3 years ago. While the original processors, Opterons, were for servers, the desktop variants, Athlon 64, soon followed. Due to the open nature of the Linux kernel, distributions of Linux supporting the 64 bit architecture were readily (and freely) available before Windows. In the past year, the Athlon 64 has made its way into laptops and more users are finding 64 bit versions of their favorite Linux distributions satisfactory for their needs.

This is my personal basic evaluation of Fedora Core 5 Test 3 (FC5-test3). Since I had recently installed and tested FC5-test2, most of my observations will be based on the differences between these 2 beta releases. Upon initial investigation there are not significant changes since the last test release. Installer I installed using the ISO images on disk to a spare 8GB partition in the same way I did for FC5-test2.