According to the Fedora-testing mailing list, Fedora Core 5 will be delayed till March 20. Due to circumstances outside of our control, we’re going to be unable to keep to the scheduled date of March 15th for the release of FC5 and instead are going to have to make the release date Monday, March 20th. While unfortunate in some ways, this gives us the opportunity to pull in the final GNOME 2.

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.

The third and final beta release for Fedora Core 5 has been announced. The Bittorrent is available, however I don’t see the main FTP or any release notes available yet. (Other mirrors do work). Highlights include: 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 GNOME 2.13.4 development release and KDE 3.

Using a template for distribution evaluation, I have installed and tested FC5-test2. Unfortunately since I did not install FC5-test1 due to installer limitations, I cannot compare this with test1. However, from what I’ve seen so far it seems much better than the poorly created FC4. Installer I chose to install using the install from ISO images on disk option (available via the linux askmethod boot option). I burned CD1 to a CD-RW and booted.

The second beta for Fedora Core 5 is available for download and testing. The bittorrent page is updated as well as the main Fedora download page. I do not think the main Release Notes have been updated yet, but some of the release highlights include: A completely revamped look and feel including a bubbly new theme, wallpaper, screensaver and logo has been provided that is visually appealing and demonstrates the exciting and user friendly nature of Fedora.